Racionalidade filosófica, racionalidade científica e os limites da tradição analítica: uma contribuição à teoria das tradições de pesquisa racional de Alasdair MacIntyre

Abstract

Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of the traditions of rational enquiry elaborates a metaphilosophical perspective from which one may evaluate the relative merits of rival frameworks of rationality in a way that resembles some canonical approaches in the philosophy of science, but in such a way as to avoid as much as possible the problems relating to the understanding of theoretic progress as the restrictions proper to relativist and perspectivist positions, so that it allows, on the one hand, a clear sight of the conditionings which operate on an investigation and, on the other, to assume a strictly realist posture anchored in a conception of truth as adequation of mind to reality. It approximates to the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition and, in its mature version, finds in this tradition its own model and takes itself to be its heir. It is committed to a conception of rationality specifically adapted, it is argued, to philosophical practice, being an important task to draw a distinction, ignored by MacIntyre, between a philosophical and a scientific rationality, the latter dedicated to the building of exploratory models adequate to the prediction and control of phenomena and the former occupied in judging of the nature and structure of reality as such. By considering the historical origin of this parting of ways and approaching the manner in which some philosophers of an Aristotelian-Thomistic orientation dealt with the relation between natural science and the philosophy of nature, the primacy is established of a philosophical perspective that does not simply take scientific rationality as its model, in order to furnish a fuller grounding to a theory of rational enquiry in MacIntyrean moulds. This complementation of MacIntyre’s theory of the traditions of rational enquiry, in its turn, allows for an elaboration of a criticism of analytic philosophy which finds in the adoption of scientific rationality as a model to philosophical rationality the element apt to confer the movement the unitary identity of a tradition. Such an identity should not be understood as adhesion to determinate theses or methodological patterns but rather as an operational presupposition, and it sheds light on MacIntyre’s sparse criticisms of that tradition, pointing toward the existence, in it, of a kind of generalized philosophical emotivism.