Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) The Organism (1939)
A Holitstic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man
Chapter nine. The Nature of Biological Knowledge
The epistemological relationship between biological and natural science
The symbolic character of knowledge in general.
...Heinrich Hertz* considers the urgent and most important task of natural science to be that of enabling us to predict future experiences. However, the method which natural science uses for deducing the future from the past consists in making “‘fictitious images or symbols’ of the outer objects, of such a sort that the images, in the logical order of ideas, will always be suitable to represent those objects in their physically necessary order.
Once we have succeeded in deducing from previously collected data images of the required consistency, then we can develop from them in a short time, as from models, the consequences which will appear in the outer world after a longer time or as the sequelae of our own interference. ... The images, of which we speak, are not concepts of things; they coincide with things in one essential point which lies in the fulfillment of the stated postulate; but for their purpose, it is not necessary that they coincide with the objects in any further way. Indeed, we do not know, and have no way of learning, whether our images of things coincide with things in any other regard than only in this one fundamental relationship.”
* Hertz, H., Die Prinzipien der Mechanik (Vorrede), Leipzig, 1894.
... There is no direct transition from collecting and ordering of facts, as empiricism does it, to physical knowledge. Cassirer believes it is a matter of a μετάβασις είσ άλλο γένοζ, a transition to a new perspective. “Instead of the concrete data, we use symbolic images, which are supposed to correspond to data on the basis of theoretical postulates which the observer considers as true and valid. . . . The significance of these concepts is not manifest in the immediate perception, but can be determined and secured only by an extremely complex process of intellectual interpretation.”* This conceptual interpretation represents the character of physical theory.
The type of biological knowledge, which we here advance, agrees in its fundamental tendency with the above characterized epistemological approach. We think one should not content oneself with a mere ordering of empirical findings, and we deny a direct transition from these findings to the objective of knowledge in biology: the comprehension of the prototype of the organism.
* Cassirer, E., Philosophie der symbolischen Formen., Cassirer, Berlin, Vol. I-III; 1923, ’28, ’29.