The course will specifically analyze the following topics:
Since the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideal of real, universal and certain scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge was attributed to the maximum the characteristic of objectivity, understood as an intersubjective agreement among the lovers of a discipline, which does not imply a knowledge of reality and, therefore, the claim that such knowledge is true.
The course, analyzing both the thought of Evandro Agazzi, with particular reference to his recent volume The scientific objectivity and its contexts, and that of Giulio Preti, with reference to the new and expanded edition of his book Rhetoric and Logic, addresses the problem of 'scientific objectivity showing how the intersubjective agreement is based on the use of standardized operations, noting, however, how these operations are also the same that allow you to study any "thing" from a certain "point of view" that only traces some aspects. This form of knowledge fits the rest within a tradition of thought such as the western one in which two different and antinomical cultural formality have always been confronted and clashed, that is the one that refers to scientific thought (logic) and that which instead makes appeal to rhetoric.
Bearing in mind the complexity of this twofold tradition of thought, we thus recognize a reference of science to reality and the legitimacy of assigning to its theories a value of truth, authentic though circumscribed to their specific objects. Since theories explain the observable facts by postulating unobservable entities, it follows that, when they can be considered true, the existence of such undetectable objects must be admitted. Therefore the reasons for a possible scientific realism will be illustrated. Copious historical references, accurate semiotic and logical analyzes and a precise discussion of objections illustrate the possible defense of this perspective, in which due consideration is given to the historical, social and cultural "contexts" of scientific research, which also justify the themes of science and ethical technology. Finally, this allows to connote the specific modality with which, in the contemporary debate, the traditional image of knowledge can and must be rethought, overcoming every form of dogmatic scientism in order to recover a more fruitful dialectic between the "two cultures", the scientific one and the one humanities.