Mario Bunge

Mario Augusto Bunge (West Florida, September 21, 1919-Montreal, February 24, 2020) was an Argentine nationalized Canadian epistemologist, philosopher, physicist, and critic. most cited Spanish-speaking scientists in history. During his long career, Bunge declared himself a realist, scientist, systemist, materialist, defender of scientific realism and promoter of exact philosophy.

He was known for publicly expressing his opposition as a philosopher of science to pseudosciences, among which he included psychoanalysis, praxeology, homeopathy, neoclassical (or orthodox) microeconomics, among others, in addition to his criticisms of philosophical currents such as existentialism (especially the work of Heidegger), phenomenology, postmodernism, hermeneutics and philosophical feminism.

After the 1966 coup, which overthrew the radical democratic government of Arturo Umberto Illia, Mario was detained by the police; after that, he settled in Montreal, Canada, where he lived until his death.

In economic and political terms, Bunge proposed a defense of "socialism as cooperativism", differentiating himself and making strong criticisms of Soviet-type socialism and populism. He taught philosophy in Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, USA, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and Australia. He also held the Frothingham Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Biography

Bunge's father (Augusto Bunge) was a doctor and socialist deputy, and his mother (Maria Müser) a German nurse who emigrated to Argentina before the start of World War I. He completed his secondary studies at the Colegio National University of Buenos Aires and received a doctorate in physics and mathematics from the National University of La Plata. He was a professor of theoretical physics and philosophy, 1956-1963, first at the University of La Plata and then at the University of Buenos Aires. Until the day he died, he was a professor of logic and metaphysics at McGill University (in Montreal), where he had taught since 1966.

Bunge has four children: two Argentines with his first wife, Carlos F. (physicist, born 1941) and Mario A. J. (mathematician, born 1943), and two Canadians, Eric R. (architect, born 1967). and Silvia A. (professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, born 1973), the latter conceived from his union with the mathematician Marta Irene Cavallo, born 1938.

Influences on his thinking

A review of Bunge's work allows us to identify a variety of scientists and philosophers who, in one way or another, have influenced the development of his thought. Among all of them, Bunge has explicitly recognized the direct influence of his father, the Argentine doctor Augusto Bunge; the Czech physicist Guido Beck, the Argentine mathematician Alberto González Domínguez; also from Argentina, mathematician, physicist and computer scientist, Manuel Sadosky; the Italian sociologist and psychologist Gino Germani; the American sociologist Robert King Merton, and the Franco-Polish philosopher Émile Meyerson.

Acknowledgments

Mario Bunge was distinguished with 21 honorary doctorates and four honorary professorships by universities in the Americas and Europe. Bunge has been a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1984 and of the Royal Society of Canada since 1992. In 1982 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award; in 1986 with the Konex Prize in the discipline "Logic and Theory of Science"; in 2009 the Guggenheim Fellowship; in 2014 he was awarded the Ludwig von Bertalanffy Prize in Complexity Thinking; and in 2016 he received his second Konex Prize, this time in the field of "Logic and Philosophy of Science".

Death

She died on February 24, 2020 at the age of 100 in a hospital in Montreal, the city where she had lived since 1966.

Interests

His interests encompassed general philosophy (semantics, ontology, epistemology, research methodology, praxiology, and ethics) as well as biology, psychology, and social sciences, without avoiding considerations about the philosophy of logic and mathematics as foundation not only of scientific but also philosophical work. He considers mathematics only as a deductive science, without highlighting the phase of mathematical production [investigation], which uses experimentation, intuition, finite cases and analogy, as considered by the Hungarian mathematician George Polya (1887-1985). He also testified about seventy mathematicians working in the United States, among them the Finnish mathematician Lars Ahlfors (1907-1996). In relation to this, he is the founder of the Society for Exact Philosophy, which seeks to use only exact concepts, defined through logic or mathematics in order to avoid the ambiguity and imprecision characteristic of other philosophical styles, including phenomenological, the postmodern (especially the hermeneutic) and provokes (as well as stimulates) the treatment of non-trivial problems as a contrast to the gigantic bookish philosophical production that recursively interprets the opinions of other philosophers or that plays with ideal objects or possible worlds.

His critical position was balanced by his original contributions and by the approach of paths of philosophical reconstruction.

It is true that in science there are no real paths (royal roads: ‘kings of the king’); that research opens up in the jungle of events, and that outstanding scientists elaborate their own style of research.

Mario Bunge

About her books

Science, its method and its philosophy (1960), a work in which he synthetically introduces the bases of the scientific method, has become a classic of its kind. But if you want to get an in-depth perspective of his philosophical conception without going through the extensive Treatise, possibly the most recommendable option is his manual Scientific Investigation, first published in English in 1967, whose translation has been reprinted with corrections by Siglo XXI Editores (Mexico, 2000).

Without a doubt, the work for which Bunge has distinguished himself especially in the field of professional philosophy is the extensive Treatise on Basic Philosophy (Treatise on Basic Philosophy). It is an effort to build a system that encompasses all fields of contemporary philosophy, focusing especially on the problems raised by scientific knowledge.

Semantics (of science) is covered in the first two volumes (Semantics 1. Sense and Reference and Semantics 2. Interpretation and Truth) and ontology in the next two (Ontology 1. The Furniture of the World and Ontology 2. A World of Systems).

The epistemology occupies the three subsequent volumes (Epistemology and Methodology 1. Exploring the World, Epistemology and Methodology 2. Explaining the World and Epistemology and Methodology 3. Philosophy of Science and Technology).

Finally, volume 8 of the Treatise deals with ethics (Ethics. The Good and the Right).

Its emphasis on methodological rigor ―sought with the use of formal tools (logical-mathematical) and scientifically-based knowledge―, its thematic breadth, its originality and its aforementioned systemic character make the Treatise one of the most ambitious philosophical undertakings of the last centuries.^{[citation needed]}

Philosophical approach

General information

Bunge's philosophical conception can be described, as he himself has done on several occasions, resorting to a conjunction of various «isms», of which the main ones are realism, scientism, materialism, systemism and emergentism.

Bunge's scientific realism encompasses the ontological (things have existence regardless of whether a subject knows them), epistemological (reality is intelligible) and ethical (there are moral facts and objective moral truths) aspects of his thought. Scientism is the conception that affirms that the best knowledge about reality is that obtained through the application of the scientific research method. Materialism, which holds that everything that exists is material (for example, for Bunge energy is a property of matter). Systemism, finally, is the perspective that everything that exists is a system or part of a system.

To this quartet we must add two more isms. Emergentism, which is associated with systemism, and is characterized by the thesis that systems have global, systemic or emergent properties that their component parts do not possess and are, therefore, irreducible to properties of lower levels of organization. And agatonism, the bungean conception of ethics, which is guided by the maxim "Enjoy life and help others to live a life worth enjoying" and assumes that each right corresponds to an obligation and vice versa.

In the ontological field, Bunge considers, regarding objects, that they are "or a thing" (material or concrete objects) "or a construct" (abstract, conceptual or ideal objects), the latter being "fictions" and not real entities; Regarding properties, these "cannot be detached (physically) from the things that possess them", while the predicates are "a conceptual representation of a property of a thing"; Regarding the laws , he defines them as & # 34; constant relations between two or more properties & # 34; and he considers that not all of them are universal. For Bunge a fact is "that a thing is in a state or that an event occurs in a thing"; likewise, chance (or randomness) is objective and is an ontological category.

Bunge conceptualizes the universe as e#34;the system such that everything else is a component of it".

In the epistemological field, Bunge affirms that "Every cognitive act is a process in some nervous system", likewise, intuition is the ability to "imagining, conceiving, reasoning, or acting quickly in novel ways" and that the scientific method "can (and should) be applied to all inquiries, whether mathematical or empirical, scientific, technological or humanistic"; likewise, he differentiates between conjecture and hypothesis, considering that & # 34; only educated guesses that are explicitly formulated and are stable can be called scientific hypotheses & # 34;

The scientific realism of Mario Bunge

Like other authors, Bunge distinguishes three shades of realism, one naive, one critical, and one scientific. Bungean realism is of this last type and is characterized by being a conjunction of seven realistic theses that cover practically all of his philosophical thought, hence the name of integral realism. Even more important is that these different aspects of Bungean realism are linked together by various relationships, in such a way that they constitute a system. That is why Bunge also calls his special version of scientific realism hilorrealism (or hylerrealism, from the Greek hyle, 'material', 'matter'), because it always goes hand in hand with the materialist ontological thesis. In addition, and as we will see later, bungean hilorealism is also systemist (both ontologically and epistemologically) and emergentist.

There are, however, some areas in which Bunge defends positions other than realism. In the philosophy of mathematics, for example, he opts for a moderate fictionalism, in aesthetics he considers it just another current or even a conservative perspective, and in politics ("realpolitik") he rejects it outright, considering it another name for political cynicism.

The aspects in which Bunge professes scientific hylorrealism, one of the main axes of his vast work, are: (i) ontological (ii) gnoseological (iii) semantic (iv) methodological (v) axiological (vi) moral and (vii) praxiological.

The systemism

Mario Bunge's systemist conception has two main aspects, one ontological and the other epistemological. The ontological systemism that Bunge defends postulates that the world is a system of systems, that is to say that every concrete thing is a system or a component of some system. A system is, in effect, a structured complex object, whose parts are related to each other by means of links (structure) belonging to a certain level. Furthermore, since a system is characterized by having properties that its components do not have (that is, global or emergent properties), Bunge's systemism is also emergentist. In other words, the Bungean ontology is monistic with respect to substance and pluralistic with respect to properties.

Characterization of science

The Bungean characterization of science conceives of it as «an object too complex to be characterized by a single feature» and identifies it as a cognitive field, which ―in turn― is characterized as a «sector of human activity whose objective is to obtain, disseminate and use some kind of knowledge, be it true or false". A science, for its part, would also satisfy specific conditions such as having a domain composed solely of real entities, a philosophical background with an ontology according to which the world is composed of mutable concrete things that change according to laws, a formal background with a collection of up-to-date logical or mathematical theory or a specific background with a collection of up-to-date and reasonably confirmed data, hypotheses and theories.

Ethics

Bunge considers ethical discourse as a subject worthy of linguistic (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic) and methodological analysis. It presents reflections on the plurality of ethical systems reflected in the non-universal character of the moral code of the ancient Semitic tribes and in the social historical character of morality shown in the adoption of new moral codes (such as puritanism or utilitarianism).

In particular, Bunge states that an act can be moral or amoral, but never immoral in an absolute sense, it will be immoral relative to a certain class of moral codes.

Luther and Calvin said our destiny is to suffer, not to enjoy. Einstein argued that happiness is for pigs. I think the hedonist, that is, who only seeks his own happiness, is nothing but a boy. But you can enjoy life in good conscience if you also do something for others. And you can always do something, especially when you do it with others in voluntary organizations of public good. Tell me what percentage of your country's population acts on volunteerism and I'll tell you how morally advanced it is.

Mario Bunge

Politics

Bunge identifies five basic types of defensive nationalism and another five of aggressive nationalism (territorial, biological or ethnic, economic, political and cultural) that can be combined and form ten pairs, ten triplets, five quartets and a quintet; giving a total of 62 nationalisms.

No party, once it is in power, can afford to be guided strictly by its own ideology, because it soon discovers that the real world is too complex and changing to be accurately described by an orthodoxy—and because the exercise of power demands negotiation and commitment—.

Mario Bunge

Applied Philosophy

Natural sciences

Physics

Regarding the "origin" of the universe, Bunge considers that the big bang hypothesis & # 34; is not an example of creation ex nihilio, since he presupposes that the universe already existed & # 34;.

Spacetime

Prior to the detection of gravitational waves in September 2015 by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Bunge had a relationalist position on the nature of space and time (qualified by Taqatqeh as the paleobungean characterization), considering that they were not "objects that exist by themselves (or containers of things)", being a property of material objects ―only having simultaneous objects (space) and successive ones (time)―; thus, "without different and changing things there is no spacetime"; in addition, that spacetime had no properties because it was a property and that "what guides the movement of things is the gravitational field".Later, he affirmed that both gravitational waves and space-time are material, with the precision that space is a thing whose existence is based on the existence of other material things (qualified by Taqatqeh as a type of substantive-relationship); in contrast, Romero believes that spacetime can also exist in the absence of another material entity.

The implication of his previous position on the expansion of the universe was that such movement of the universe could occur if the universe were finite and if space and time were the immutable stage in which it unfolds, but if space and time existed as relationships between things and events, the universe would have nowhere to go; so one should speak of "mutual recession of galaxies" rather than expansion of the universe. On the other hand, for Bunge spacetime is a structural quality of the gravitational field and this (and not spacetime) is what guides the movement of things. As for the existence of empty space or perfect vacuum, he indicates that contemporary physics favors the hypothesis that they do not exist, but that & # 34; space is full of things & # 34;; This was criticized by Romero, whose position is that spacetime can exist in the absence of matter.

On the other hand, for Bunge, time is "the rhythm of events" and, in line with the two theories of relativity, "everything has its own time, so there is no universal time". In addition, he coined the principle of spatiotemporal contiguity, through which he postulates that & # 34; Any action of one thing on another fulfills both the conditions of antecedence and those of close action & # 34;; affirming that "there is no absolute time or without things" and that there are no "timeless things"; also, that, as a consequence of the principle of antecedence, "it is not possible to return to the past", in other words, "time machines are impossible& #3. 4; and "prescience experiences are not possible".

The easiest theory of time refines the intuition of Aristotle and Leibniz, that time is the order of events. It therefore adopts the concept of events or events as a basic concept, and implicitly defines (by postulates) the notion of temporary distance between two events. This theory of time can be generalized to space-time, to meet the relativistic requirement.

Mario Bunge

Energy

Regarding the nature of energy, Bunge considers it important to emphasize ―since "some people maintain that energy is a substance of the same category as matter"― that this is a "property of things" and points out as a correct interpretation of the formula E=mc2: "the amount of energy of a thing is equal to the amount of its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light".

Quantum mechanics

For Bunge, quantum mechanics can be reinterpreted in the same way that classical physics is interpreted; in this regard, he considers that quantum objects are neither waves nor particles, but an entity sui generis, on which he proposes the name of "quantons", thereby eliminating the duality particle-wave and the associated principle of complementarity; also, that quantum mechanics does not refer to mental states but to fragments of matter and radiation

Bunge has pointed out that Heisenberg's inequalities are "a theorem, not a principle, and that they have nothing of uncertainty (a property of certain brains)", that the Schrödinger cat wave function "does not exist"

Regarding the refutation of Bell's inequalities, Bunge indicates that this does not imply that realism is invalid, but rather that deterministic theories with hidden variables are incompatible with the assumption of locality.

Bunge indicates that the Copenhagen doctrine is scientifically and philosophically untenable, being incoherent and not being strictly physical.

Plant the problem of calculating the possible levels of energy of an isolated atom of a given species, and conclude by interpreting the result of the calculus as the values that an experimenter can gain that strongly disrupts the atom, even though the atom may be so far that no experimenter can act on it. This is going for atoms and going back to experimenters.

Mario Bunge

That is why he affirms that a fully physical theory cannot be obtained if it has to satisfy “non-physical requirements such as the postulate that there are no autonomous entities, that is, independent of the subject”. He further states that the Copenhagen school confuses the verification of a theory with its referent (it identifies a methodological problem with a semantic issue).

The recipe to build strictly physical versions of the MC is this: "Take the standard fomulation and place it on its subjectivist elements and finally make logical arrangements for what remains."

Mario Bunge

String Theory

For Bunge, string theory is suspect (as pseudoscience). He claims that it looks scientific because it addresses an open problem that is both important and difficult, that of constructing a quantum theory of gravitation, but that the theory postulates that physical space has six or seven dimensions, instead of three, simply to ensure mathematical consistency. Since these extra dimensions are unobservable, and since the theory has resisted experimental confirmation for more than three decades, he concludes that it sounds like "science fiction,", or at least, "failed science".

Biology

According to Bunge, living entities, although composed of physical and chemical elements, have their own emergent properties; Therefore, biology is not completely reducible to physics and chemistry, this model is called biosystemism. In this context, a living being is a material system that (i) its composition includes nucleic acids and proteins (both structural and functional), (ii) its environment includes some of the precursors of its components, and (iii) its structure includes the abilities to metabolize and to maintain and repair itself (within certain limits); with this, the viruses, by not metabolizing, are not alive; the cell being the smallest unit of life. A biosystem can originate through self-assembly from abiotic precursors (neobiogenesis), be synthesized in vitro, or descend from already existing biosystems.

Regarding the strong Gaia hypothesis, which is the idea that the biosphere is a living (super)organism, it is incorrect.

Brain and mind

Bunge defines the concept of mind as follows: "the mind of an animal b during a period T is the union or logical sum of all the specific processes (functions) that occur in the plastic part p of the nervous system of b". Regarding the nature of the mind, he criticizes the psychophysical dualism (the thesis that there are minds as well as bodies) for its imprecision in offering neither a theory nor a definition of the concept of mind, by separating mental states and events from anything that can be in such states or undergo such changes, as it is compatible with creationism, but not with evolutionary biology; and, especially, for hindering the investigation. And he opts for emergent materialism, which "keeps psychology within the field of science instead of encouraging it to return to philosophy or theology" and admits the specificity of the mental together with the need to investigate it by using of methods of psychology added to those of neurophysiology.

In this regard, Bunge states that "As we learn and forget, we rebuild our own brains"; accordingly, he calls the "K-class psychon"; to the "smaller plastic neural system capable of executing a K-type mental function"

In relation to higher functions, Bunge and Ardila conceive learning as "a lasting modification of a neural system, different from habituation and memory, which enables to its possessor to have experiences that he could not have before learning"; they also consider that the physiology of thinking "is still in its infancy"; in relation to knowledge they assert that "an animal b has acquired some knowledge of (some of) its environment m if b has a plastic neural system n such that certain events of m are represented as maps by events of n". In relation to consciousness, they postulate the following definitions: "The content (or object of a conscious state is the object perceived or thought of while in that state). state", "The consciousness of animal b is the set of all brain states of b in which b is aware of some perception or thought in b& #34;; for its part, in relation to self-awareness, "An animal is self-aware if, and only if, it knows who and what it is&#34 Regarding the development of consciousness, Bunge and Ardila indicate that humans seem to become aware of themselves around the age of 2 and generally acquire awareness around the age of 6. On the other hand, they hypothesize that:

• percatation and consciousness are specific activities of different subsitemes of the central nervous system,
• all conscious processes are produced in the neocortex "in conjunction with some subcortical systems, in particular thalamus, hippocampus or tonsils",
• a conscious process is "a process through which a part of the brain (...) records and controls perceptive or cognitive processes that occur elsewhere (...) of the same brain",
• consciousness comes by degrees.
• consciousness comes to the surface and submerges
• percatation and consciousness gradually develop.

Medicine

Bunge states that scientific medicine is systemic, while admitting that the parts of the human organism, although different, are interconnected; and that it is analytical, insofar as it distinguishes organs with specific functions. He further postulates that the "good doctor" puts into practice a philosophical system constituted by a materialist and systemic ontology; a realistic, skeptical and scientific epistemology; and a scientific praxiology and a humanist ethics. He also expresses that modern medicine has "developed along with basic science", but that it has had to fight against religion and against the dominant philosophies (as in the conflicts over the use of stem cells from abortions, or over the prohibition of contraception and abortion).

Social Sciences

For Bunge, social studies always ran the risk of ideological contamination, but if a neutral basic science study is genuinely scientific, it will be ideologically neutral even when it can be used to justify or prosecute social policies.

On the other hand, it indicates that social facts are multidimensional with environmental (A), biopsychological (B), economic (E), political (P) and cultural (C) aspects; suggesting that «the best way to to study social facts is not to try to reduce them to a single type of fact, but to integrate the different social and biosocial disciplines".

History

Bunge notes that history has always been suspect of a patriotic bent, as each national community of historians "seemed preponderantly devoted to singing the glories of their respective nation and casting dirt on their iniquities".

Psychology

For Bunge, every psychologist is not only a scientist or a therapist, but also an amateur philosopher; likewise, philosophers "consume" psychological products "rarely fresh", as in the case of Ryle's The concept of the mind or Strawson's philosophy of mind.

The list of philosophers familiar with contemporary psychological literature may not occupy more than one line.

Mario Bunge

Regarding behaviorism, Bunge criticizes that, like mentalism, it does not pay attention to the nervous system and, consequently, it only manages to describe behavior, but not explain it; while psychobiology, along with emergent materialism, enjoys strong experimental support. On the other hand, he considers that the humanist school has hindered the study of human beings, due to the barrier (imported from Christian theology) erected between them and nature, for his part, he believes that philosophical psychology (and its continuation, the so-called "humanistic psychology") deals with problems of behavior and the mind in the context of common knowledge with the help of exclusively philosophical tools, which is why it is alien to experimental psychology.

Education

Bunge considers the pedagogue who ensures that the way of teaching is more important than what is taught as one of the worst enemies of education, arguing that «those who do not know something cannot teach it, and those who only know it halfway can teach it wrong." He further classifies students into five species, according to the method of study they employ:

• Loros: those who learn from memory without worrying about understanding, analyzing, deepening or linking the subject to their previous experiences.
• Papirographers: those who “trace pages vertiginosously” left this very little or nothing.
• Infectants: those who leave the reading by not understanding a paragraph.
• Chronicles: those who “eternize in a topic”.
• Aware: those who instead of studying a lot study well.

Technology

Bunge indicates that there are a number of plausible "candidates" for generalization status about technological development:

1. Everything or artificial process can be improved, but only to a certain extent: there are natural and social limits.
2. Any technological innovation has unpredictable and undesirable side effects.
3. In principle, each of these defects can be repaired with the help of more knowledge or social reform.
4. Any major advance in high technology exploits some scientific discovery.
5. Only a small fraction of basic science comes to apply, and only a small fraction of applied science finds use in technology.
6. There is usually a delay of several years between scientific findings and their technological use.
7. Most inventions never take place.
8. Military technology results only in minimal secondary products of civil use and slows the progress of civil technology because it diverts brains, natural resources and funds.
9. In developing nations technology begins to be imitative.
10. Technological innovation as a function of the size of a company is a "u invertida" ():): at first it grows and then declines.

Criticism of philosophical currents

Philosophy is the most sublime, but also the most ridiculous of disciplines.

Mario Bunge

The typical professor of philosophy is a commentator or scolyst who works miniproblems or pseudoproblems before a researcher of fat problems, such as the nature of space and time, matter and mind, causality and randomness, meaning and truth, value and action, science and technique, social justice and progress. Problems or pseudo-problems of the forms "What did Fulano think about Mengano's criticism of Zutano?", "In whom did Perengano inspire?"

Mario Bunge

Critique of cosmological paradigms

Bunge considers that a cosmology can be "rough or refined, schematic or detailed, confusing or clear", as well as "magical or naturalistic, religious or secular, spiritualistic, materialistic or dualistic" as well as "ordinary or scientifically oriented, sterile or fertile".

Regarding holism, he criticizes the adoption of the thesis that "the whole determines the part" despite the fact that it is the interactions between the parts that determine the whole, which in turn conditions the behavior of the part. He further considers that despite having few contemporary advocates it can be found among social scientists. From this cosmology he rescues the thesis of the universal interconnection of things, the emergence of new properties as the corresponding systems are being constituted and the submersion of some properties as they are analyzed. As for hierarchism, he criticizes its position on the dominance of "higher" beings over the "inferior" ones instead of recognizing that the former evolved from the latter. Regarding tychismo, he states that "it is not true that a probability can be assigned to every possible event", stating that the only way to know if a process is random is "to build a probabilistic model of it and put it to the test". Of dynamism he suggests that "praise change" is fine, but that it is important to realize that there is "something constant" as in the case of a permanent property or an unchanging pattern. In the specific case of dialectic, he states that he is not exempt from counterexamples such as that for something to be internally "contradictory" it must be a complex entity, so it would not contain elementary particles such as quarks, gluons, electrons and photons; or that, "although conflict is quite real on all levels, so is cooperation."

Regarding atomism, he expresses that it is limited and that each individual entity is a component of some system, which is why he considers the free electron or photon or the isolated cell, person or nation as «idealizations» or «fictions». As for mechanism, he affirms that it "had its day of glory", acknowledging that it "stimulated a prodigious scientific and technological creativity from its inception until the middle of the 19th century", but that it declined with the birth of field physics and thermodynamics. Regarding sacralism, he expresses that it is a "naive and anachronistic" cosmology that "blinds us and at the same time ties our hands." While he defines textualism as "probably the most absurd, dogmatic, sterile, and misleading of all versions of idealism."

Criticism of logical positivism

Bunge argues that logical positivism does not possess a defensible semantics or an ontology that transcends phenomenalism, and it does not possess an ethic beyond Hume's emotivism.

Criticism of Popperianism

As for Popperianism, he considers that it rejects the idea of making semantics and its ontology does not transcend individualism, in addition to not having any ethics beyond the premises of Buddha, Epicurus and Hippocrates of not producing any harm.

Criticism of internalism, externalism, and derivative currents

On internalism, he indicates that although he correctly highlights individual creativity, he underestimates social stimuli and constraints; For its part, externalism, due to the vagueness of its expressions, can be interpreted in various ways:
a) moderate or weak externalism and
b) radical or strong externalism, which in turn can be “local” and “global” in nature.

Intellectual creativity is a trait of the brain, not of social groups. These can only stimulate or inhibit it.

Mario Bunge

It is thus that for Bunge, relativism and pragmatism, logical consequences of social constructivism, implied in turn by radical externalism, form a "logically impeccable" chain, but whose links "are false"; being these gross theoretical mistakes (since they do not agree with the practice of scientific research) and practices (because they "encourage superstition and charlatanism", and undermine "any effort to raise the cultural level and increase social welfare").

Criticism of Marxism

While regarding Marxism, it stands out its narrowly economistic character that underestimates the role of politics and culture, the fact of confusing logic with ontology and the adoption of utilitarianism as ethics.

Before Marxism could have some usefulness, it had to be moderated and activated. The first means stripping him of his radical externalist thesis that the context determines the content, and the second transforming it from dogma into research project.

Mario Bunge

Criticism of existentialism

About existentialism, he stated that it is a "dark doctrine" that "does not serve to think or to do anything other than depress, destroy or destroy oneself", considering certain of Heidegger's writings as "nonsense"; criticizing his opinions that made him usable by Nazism: his conception of man as an anguished being and therefore paralyzed by nothingness and his affirmation that reason and science are contemptible and that the only thing that matters is "naked existence"; arguing that his metaphysics was a mixture of "nonsensical statements [...], platitudes and falsehoods"; and that he did not propose a philosophy proper.

Criticism of pseudosciences

Bungean characterization of science and pseudoscience

Criticism of creationist cosmology

Bunge argues that creationism (both secular and religious) has no empirical foundation and contradicts all known conservation laws by stating that the universe was created by itself or by divinity.

Criticism of Richard Dawkins' selfish gene hypothesis

Regarding the hypothesis formulated by Richard Dawkins, Bunge criticizes his tendency to infer that the genome is the only thing that matters in development and evolution, arguing that the animals with the best chances are those that «in addition to being genetically well endowed, they possess malleable brains that allow them to learn adaptive behavior patterns."

All the biology that wants to pass Dawkins by modern biology is not such thing [...] the idea of the selfish gene is an idea against biochemistry, against genetics, which tells us that the DNA does not reproduce itself, which is divided by enzymes, that we must take into account not only the genome, we must also have the own oma, is a whole system in which they can be distinguished, but not separate the different elements. All of Dawkins' biology is imaginary. That is why it has been so successful, fiction works are sold much better than scientific works.

Mario Bunge

Critique of Daniel Dennett and evolutionary psychology

Bunge also criticizes Daniel Dennett and places him alongside Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins as disseminators of their own versions of Darwin's theory of evolution. According to Bunge, Dennett and these other authors share many ideas and are propagators of pseudoscience, which they pass off as Darwinian biological science. In his book Matter and Mind. A Philosophical Inquiry (2010), Bunge comments:

To begin with, the three writers in question have propagated innateness, whose central dogma is “Nature triumphs over parenting”, or “The genome is destiny.” This doctrine, in turn, is based on an extravagant version of genetics, according to which the DNA molecule is “egoist” or attempts to spread its own kind as far as possible (...) Another original, though incorrect, contribution of our self-proclaimed “brillants” is the idea that evolution has been programmed by “evolutionary approaches” (Dennett 1995). But, of course, a process cannot be at the same time natural and guided by algorithms, because these are artifacts. In addition, each algorithm is designed to produce infallibly a result of a prescribed type, while spice is hardly predictable...

Mario Bunge, pp. 108-109

Bunge is also a critic of evolutionary psychology as represented by David Buss, Steven Pinker and others, which he labels pseudoscience, and criticizes Dennett for being a promoter of it.

According to Bunge, Dennett, and other supporters of evolutionary psychology are dogmatically nativists, denying or failing to understand that human "nature" is intrinsically sociocultural, and that the sociocultural is beyond biology. He also criticizes Dennett and others for defending the brain-as-computer metaphor. Bunge points out that although the defenders of such a metaphor tend to consider themselves naturalists, they do not realize that computers are not natural but artificial, that they are limited to performing algorithmic operations, that they lack emotions, and many other characteristics that They differ from brains.

In addition, Bunge (2010, p. 209) mentions Dennett as one of the authors who maintain that consciousness is an illusion, and criticizes him for this.

Criticism of applications of game theory

Bunge considers applications of game theory (such as nuclear deterrence strategy, social conflicts, the emergence of social and moral norms, or military history) pseudoscientific because they oversimplify real situations, reducing them to the confrontation of two isolated agents, as if there were no third parties and as if the two agents did not have a future in common; because the benefits or utilities that appear in the general theory, as well as in its applications, are not objective or measurable, but rather subjective and difficult or impossible to verify; and because it is always possible to manipulate those numbers in such a way that the optimal solution to a DP-type problem is cooperation or confrontation, whichever is preferred.

Criticism of neoclassical economics

Bunge considers that being formulated in rigorous mathematical terms, the neoclassical approach theory has a "brilliant scientific appearance". Yet he doesn't study real economic systems, ignores history and all macro-social constraints, and doesn't care about the environment or future generations. It also fails to account for price formation or money, does not explain inflation or stagflation, does not accurately predict economic booms and busts, and ignores forces like unions, monopolies, multinational corporations, the omnipresent state, and the ruling class. military.

Criticism of subjective value theory

Bunge qualifies subjective value theory as pseudoscientific and economics as "semi-science". The subjective value in any of its forms, be it utility, preferences, satisfaction, etc., cannot be measured objectively. The fact that they cannot be objectively measured precludes any empirical study. He also criticized other assumptions, methods and concepts related to this theory such as rationality and knowledge of consumers, the competitive and aggressive nature of the human being, the principle of non-satiability, methodological individualism, etc. In addition to the inconsistencies with the assumptions and axioms of the economic schools that adopt this theory, because it is not measurable and because of the absence of empirical studies, it uses obscure language, has a history of ad hoc reworkings, and is not combined with other disciplines, which, according to Bunge, it makes the theory pseudoscientific.

Criticism of sociobiology

Bunge criticizes sociobiology's attempt to reduce sociology to biology (and in particular to genetics) by arguing that social systems have components (such as transportation networks) and properties (such as political organization) that are not biological. He further states that "if every bit of social behavior were only a survival mechanism, all institutions should be present in all cultures and there would be no social practices that constituted a threat to life, such as environmental pollution, reproduction without limits and militarism".

Criticism of parapsychology

Criticism of parapsychology focuses on the lack of genuine empirical evidence for the existence of individuals endowed with abilities such as telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, or telekinesis. Bunge further argues that parapsychologists do not seek laws or physical explanations of the paranormal (exposing a similar attitude in religious believers); that paranormal phenomena are inconsistent with some of the basic principles of science or with some of the general philosophical principles that underlie scientific investigation; that, unlike any scientific discipline, parapsychology is not a component of the science system; and that, in the specific case of psi waves, it is not known which equations satisfy or devices could not be designed to detect them.

Criticism of psychoanalysis

Bunge has vigorously attacked psychoanalysis on numerous occasions. The reasons that he has offered can be grouped into two types: methodological reasons and empirical evidence. The first constitute a critique of the way of proceeding of the researchers who have developed psychoanalysis, from Freud to the present day. This way of proceeding, affirms Bunge, is at odds with the minimum requirements accepted by the international scientific community to consider that a piece of research is scientific. In other words, psychoanalysts do not use the general strategy of inquiry known as the scientific method. Reasons of the second type show that the data do not support psychoanalytic ideas.

Criticism of traditional medicine

According to Bunge, traditional medicines did not distinguish the subjective symptom from the objective sign or indicator, they did not measure any variable and they did not carry out clinical trials or have statistics; Furthermore, with the exception of certain prophylactic and dietary advice, contemporary medicine uses almost none of the knowledge of traditional medicine. In the case of acupuncture, the center of traditional Chinese therapy, he expresses that "it is useless except as an analgesic placebo"; of Hindu medicine, which despite inventing some remarkable surgical procedures, applied them without asepsis or anesthesia, and that the Ayurvedic pharmacopoeia was massively fanciful.

Criticism of complementary and alternative medicine

For Bunge, alternative medicines handle products of an unknown nature, applied to people not studied and with effects of unknown type and intensity, likewise it considers that the therapies are effective to some extent due to two factors: the spontaneous return to health (vis medicatrix naturae) and the set of placebo effects and that alternative therapies are as unfounded and ineffective as traditional ones.

Holistic Medicine

Unlike contemporary medicine, which is systemic and analytical, for Bunge, by trying to treat the whole, the holist "misses the peculiarities of all the parts".

Homeopathy

Criticism of homeopathy focuses on the lack of pharmacological studies that show the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies and clinical trials that prove the improvement of patients who take them.

Naturopathy

Understood as a component of naturism, which is considered by Bunge as essentially a value judgment ("What is natural is better than what is artificial"), the criticism focuses on the deregulation of the sale of natural products because they are considered harmless, taking As a consequence, the lack of detailed knowledge of the composition of each product and the biochemical mechanisms that it unleashes, accelerates or slows down when ingested.