Two Philosophical Faces Of Philosophy As Product And Philosophy As A

Process
By: Siti Sarah Rahmaini

philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of

science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the
reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This
discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example,
when it explores the relationship between science and truth. There is no consensus
among philosophers about many of the central problems concerned with the
philosophy of science, including whether science can reveal the truth about
unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can be justified at all. In
addition to these general questions about science as a whole, philosophers of
science consider problems that apply to particular sciences (such as biology or
physics). Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science
to reach conclusions about philosophy itself.

While philosophical thought pertaining to science dates back at least to the

time of Aristotle, philosophy of science emerged as a distinct discipline only in
the middle of the 20th century in the wake of the logical positivism movement,
which aimed to formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical statements'
meaningfulness and objectively assessing them. Thomas Kuhn's landmark 1962
book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was also formative, challenging the
view of scientific progress as steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based
on a fixed method of systematic experimentation and instead arguing that any
progress is relative to a "paradigm," the set of questions, concepts, and practices
that define a scientific discipline in a particular historical period.[1] Karl Popper
and Charles Sanders Peirce moved on from positivism to establish a modern set of
standards for scientific methodology.

Subsequently, the coherentist approach to science, in which a theory is

validated if it makes sense of observations as part of a coherent whole, became
prominent due to W. V. Quine and others. Some thinkers such as Stephen Jay
Gould seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions, such as the uniformity of
nature. A vocal minority of philosophers, and Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) in
particular, argue that there is no such thing as the "scientific method", so all
approaches to science should be allowed, including explicitly supernatural ones.
Another approach to thinking about science involves studying how knowledge is
created from a sociological perspective, an approach represented by scholars like
David Bloor and Barry Barnes. Finally, a tradition in continental philosophy

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approaches science from the perspective of a rigorous analysis of human
experience.

Philosophies of the particular sciences range from questions about the

nature of time raised by Einstein's general relativity, to the implications of
economics for public policy. A central theme is whether one scientific discipline
can be reduced to the terms of another. That is, can chemistry be reduced to
physics, or can sociology be reduced to individual psychology? The general
questions of philosophy of science also arise with greater specificity in some
particular sciences. For instance, the question of the validity of scientific
reasoning is seen in a different guise in the foundations of statistics. The question
of what counts as science and what should be excluded arises as a life-or-death
matter in the philosophy of medicine. Additionally, the philosophies of biology, of
psychology, and of the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of
human nature can achieve objectivity or are inevitably shaped by values and by
social relations.

Philosophy of Science is the study of the assumptions, foundations, and

implications of natural science (which is usually taken to mean biology,
chemistry, physics, earth science and astronomy, as opposed to social science
which deals with human behaviour and society). It asks questions like: "What is
science?", "What are the aims of science" and "How ought we interpret the results
of science?".

Scientism is the broad-based belief that the assumptions and methods of

research of the physical and natural sciences are equally appropriate (or even
essential) to all other disciplines, including philosophy, the humanities and the
social sciences. Positivism is the closely related philosophy which holds that the
only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can
only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method
(which means the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and
the formulation and testing of hypotheses).

One of the central questions in the Philosophy of Science is distinguishing

science from non-science, although many regard the problem as unsolvable or
moot. Historically, the main point of contention was beteeen science and religion
and, even today, many opponents of intelligent design claim that it does not meet
the criteria of science and should thus not be treated on equal footing as evolution.
The criteria for science typically include:

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  the formulation of hypotheses that meet the logical criteria of contingency
(i.e. not logically necessarily true or false), falsifiability (i.e. capable of
being proved false) and testability (i.e. there is some real hope of
establishing whether it is true or false)
 a grounding in empirical evidence
 the use of the scientific method

Empiricism (and, later, Positivism and Logical Positivism) grounded

science in observation, and campaigned for a systematic reduction of all human
knowledge to logical and scientific foundations. Non-science, on the other hand,
(e.g. Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion) was non-observational and hence
meaningless, a theory also known as Verificationism.

Karl Popper (1902 - 1994), in response to the Logical Positivists,

recognized that a theory might well be meaningful without being scientific, and
that the central feature of science was that it aims at falsifiable claims (i.e. claims
that can be proven false, at least in theory), which he called Falsificationism.

The American Thomas Kuhn (1922 - 1996) pointed out that most science
was what he called normal science (problem solving work within the bounds of
current theory and knowledge). However, when many anomalies are generated
during the process of doing normal science, it may become accepted that the work
is actually extraordinary (or revolutionary) science within the current scientific
paradigm. There may then occur a paradigm shift (such as the shift from
Newtonian science to Einsteinian science) until the new paradigm is accepted as
the norm by the scientific community and integrated into their previous work.
Kuhn argued that a new paradigm is accepted mainly because it has a superior
ability to solve problems that arise in the process of doing normal science, and
pseudoscience or non-science can then be defined by a failure to provide
explanations within such a paradigm.

In this way, science progresses not just by gradually building on the works
of the past as had always been assumed, but by a series of revolutions in which
the ways of thinking in the scientific community are changed completely. Kuhn's
1962 book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was hugely popular, and
remains one of philosophy's most cited works. It has been called by some "the
most influential work of philosophy in the latter hald of the 20th Century". Paul
Feyerabend (1924 - 1994) argued that science does not occupy a special place in
terms of either its logic or method, and that there is no method within the history
of scientific practice which has not been violated at some point in the advancing

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of scientific knowledge, so that any claim to special authority made by scientists
cannot be upheld.

Just about 20 years ago, I abandoned a career as a physical chemist to

become a philosopher of science. For most of those 20 years, people (especially
scientists) have been asking me what the heck the philosophy of science is, and
whether scientists have any need of it. There are lots of things philosophers of
science study, but one central set of concerns is what is distinctive about science --
how science differs from other human activities, what grounds its body of
knowledge, what features are essential to scientific engagement with phenomena,
etc. This means philosophers of science have spent a good bit of time trying to
find the line between science and non-science, trying to figure out the logic with
which scientific claims are grounded, working to understand the relation between
theory and empirical data, and working out the common thread that unites many
disparate scientific fields -- assuming such a common thread exists. *

If you like, you can think of this set of philosophical projects as trying to
give an account of what science is trying to do -- how science attempts to
construct a picture of the world that is accountable to the world in a particular
way, how that picture of the world develops and changes in response to further
empirical information (among other factors), and what kind of explanations can be
given for the success of scientific accounts (insofar as they have been successful).
Frequently, the philosopher is concerned with "Science" rather than a particular
field of science. As well, some philosophers are more concerned with an idealized
picture of science as an optimally rational knowledge building activity --
something they will emphasize is quite different from science as actually
practiced.

Practicing scientists pretty much want to know how to attack questions in their
particular field of science. If your goal is to understand the digestive system of
some exotic bug, you may have no use at all for a subtle account of scientific
theory change, let alone for a firm stand on the question of scientific anti-realism.
You have much more use for information about how to catch the bug, how to get
to its digestive system, what sorts of things you could observe measure or
manipulate that could give you useful information about its digestive system, how
to collect good data, how to tell when you've collected enough data to draw useful
conclusions, appropriate methods for processing the data and drawing
conclusions, and so forth.

Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that
the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive

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philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we
experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western
metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of
static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances
or ontologically secondary and derivative. For process philosophers the adventure
of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics
marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether: what is dynamicity or becoming — if it
is the way we experience reality, how should we interpret this metaphysically?
Are there several varieties of becoming — for instance, the uniform going on of
activities versus the coming about of developments? Do all developments have the
same way of occurring quite independently of what is coming about? How can we
best classify into different kinds of occurrences what is going on and coming
about? How can we understand the emergence of apparently novel conditions?

While process philosophers insist that all within and about reality is
continuously going on and coming about, they do not deny that there are
temporally stable and reliably recurrent aspects of reality. But they take such
aspects of persistence to be the regular behavior of dynamic organizations that
arise due to the continuously ongoing interaction of processes. In order to
articulate a process view of reality, special theoretical efforts are required,
however, since the standard theoretical tools of Western metaphysics are geared to
the static view of reality. Especially the standard interpretation of predicate logic
in terms of static individuals with properties that are exemplified timelessly or at a
temporal instant consolidates what is from the process-philosophical perspective
an unhelpful theoretical bias. This has forced upon process philosophy a double
role as metaphysical and metaphilosophical enterprise — pushing for a paradigm
change, process philosophy has the double task of developing new explanatory
concepts and providing arguments for why these concepts better serve the aims of
philosophy.

Process philosophy centers on ontology and metaphysics, but it has full

systematic scope: its concern is with the dynamic sense of being as becoming or
occurrence, the conditions of spatio-temporal existence, the kinds of dynamic
entities, the relationship between mind and world, and the realization of values in
action. Some approaches to process philosophy are conceived on the grand scale
and offer a full-scope metaphysics in the form of a systematic theory or
comprehensive philosophical view. Other approaches, especially more recent
ones, take a more modest approach. They pursue the specific problems that the
various philosophical disciplines are engaged in while focusing on the dynamic
aspects of each sub-domain. Such process ontologies, process ethics, process

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epistemologies, process theories of mind etc. are contributions to ‘process
philosophy’ more broadly conceived as a research paradigm of philosophical
inquiry. They share the guiding idea that natural existence consists in modes of
becoming and types of occurrences. ‘Processists’ agree that the world is an
assembly of physical, organic, social, and cognitive processes that interact at and
across levels of dynamic organization. However, within that broad framework,
process philosophers debate about how such a world of processes is to be
construed, how it relates to the human mind (which is another process) and how
the dynamic nature of reality relates to our scientific theories. In consequence,
process philosophers also differ in their view on the role of philosophy itself and
in their choice of theoretical style.

Process philosophy opposes ‘substance metaphysics,’ the dominant

research paradigm in the history of Western philosophy since Aristotle. Substance
metaphysics proceeds from the intuition—first formulated by the pre-Socratic
Greek philosopher Parmenides—that being should be thought of as simple, hence
as internally undifferentiated and unchangeable. Substance metaphysicians recast
this intuition as the claim that the primary units of reality (called “substances”)
must be static—they must be what they are at any instant in time. In contrast to
the substance-metaphysical snapshot view of reality, with its typical focus on
eternalist being and on what there is, process philosophers analyze becoming and
what is occurring as well as ways of occurring. In some process accounts,
becoming is the mode of being common to the many kinds of occurrences or
dynamic beings. Other process accounts hold that being is ongoing self-
differentiation; on these accounts becoming is both the mode of being of different
kinds of dynamic beings and the process that generates different kinds of dynamic
beings. In order to develop a taxonomy of dynamic beings (types and modes of
occurrences), processists replace the descriptive concepts of substance
metaphysics with a set of new basic categories. Central among these is the notion
of a basic entity that is individuated in terms of what it ‘does.’ This type of
functionally individuated entity is often labeled ‘process’ in a technical sense of
this term that does not coincide with our common-sense notion of a process. Some
of the ‘processes’ postulated by process philosophers are—in agreement with our
common-sense understanding of processes—temporal developments that can be
analyzed as temporally structured sequences of stages of an occurrence, with each
such stage being numerically and qualitatively different from any other. But some
of the ‘processes’ that process philosophers operate with are not temporal
developments in this sense — they are, for example, temporal but non-
developmental occurrences like activities, or non-spatiotemporal happenings that
realize themselves in a developmental fashion and thereby constitute the

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directionality of time. What holds for all dynamic entities labelled ‘processes,’
however, is that they occur — that they are somehow or other intimately
connected to time, and often, though not necessarily, related to the directionality
or the passage of time.

Process philosophers claim that there are many sound philosophical

reasons to take the processual aspects of nature, cognition, and action as
fundamental features of the real. The perhaps most powerful argument for process
philosophy is its wide descriptive or explanatory scope. If we admit that the basic
entities of our world are processes, we can generate better philosophical
descriptions of all the kinds of entities and relationships we are committed to
when we reason about our world in common sense and in science: from quantum
entanglement to c onsciousness, from computation to feelings, from things to
institutions, from organisms to societies, from traffic jams to climate change, from
spacetime to beauty. Moreover, results in cognitive science, some philosophers
have claimed, show that we need a process metaphysics in order to develop a
naturalist theory of the mind and of normativity. These arguments form the
background for the processist criticism of the focus on substance in Western
philosophy. The bias towards substances seems to be rooted partly in the
cognitive dispositions of speakers of Indo-European languages, and partly in
theoretical habituation, as the traditional prioritization of static entities
(substances, objects, states of affairs, static structures) at the beginning of Western
metaphysics built on itself. In contrast, process philosophy shows fewer affinities
to any particular language group and can allude to a rich tradition of reflection in
many of the great schools of Eastern thought. As recently appeared, process
philosophy also has an increasing practical dimension, since only if we re-
visualize our world as a system of interactions can we come to grips, conceptually
and ethically, with the new phenomena of artificial life, artificial intelligence, and
artificial sociality, and investigate the exceptionality of human capacities and the
scope of moral obligation. Thus contemporary process philosophy holds out the
promise of offering superior support for the three most pressing tasks of
philosophy at the beginning of the 21st century. First, it provides the category-
theoretic tools for an integrated metaphysics that can join our common sense and
scientific images of the world. Second, it can serve as a theoretical platform upon
which to build an intercultural philosophy and to facilitate interdisciplinary
research on global knowledge representation by means of an ontological
framework that is no longer parochially Western. Third, it supplies concepts that
facilitate interdiscplinary collaboration on reflected technology development, and
enable the cultural and ethical imagination needed to shape the expectable deep

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socio-cultural changes engendered by the increased use of technology, especially
automation.

Process philosophy is a longstanding philosophical tradition that

emphasizes becoming and changing over static being. Though present in many
historical and cultural periods, the term “process philosophy” is primarily
associated with the work of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-
1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000).

Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse

intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic)
into a coherent holistic scheme. Process philosophy seeks a return to a neo-
classical realism that avoids subjectivism. This reconciliation of the intuitions of
objectivity and subjectivity, with a concern for scientific findings, produces the
explicitly metaphysical speculation that the world, at its most fundamental level,
is made up of momentary events of experience rather than enduring material
substances. Process philosophy speculates that these momentary events, called
“actual occasions” or “actual entities,” are essentially self-determining,
experiential, and internally related to each other.

Actual occasions correspond to electrons and sub-atomic particles, but also

to human persons. The human person is a society of billions of these occasions
(that is, the body), which is organized and coordinated by a single dominant
occasion (that is, the mind). Thus, process philosophy avoids a strict mind-body
dualism.

Most process philosophers speculate that God is also an actual entity,

though there is an internal debate among process thinkers whether God is a series
of momentary actual occasions, like other worldly societies, or a single everlasting
and constantly developing actual entity. Either way, process philosophy conceives
of God as dipolar. God’s primordial nature is the permanent ground of value and
determinacy and a storehouse for universals, or “envisaged potentialities.” God’s
consequent nature, on the other hand, takes in data from the world at every
instant, changing as the world changes. A considerable number of process
philosophers argue that God is not a necessary element of the metaphysical
system and may be excised from the process model without any loss of
consistency.

Process philosophy has also been cited as a unique synthesis of classical

methodology, modern concerns for scientific adequacy, and post-modern critiques
of hegemony, dualism, determinism, materialism, and egocentrism. In this

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respect, process philosophy is sometimes called “constructive postmodernism,”
alluding to its speculative method of system building with a hypothetical and
fallible stance, over the alternative of deconstruction.

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 RESUME MAKALAH
A. Filsafat sebagai produk dan filsafat sebagai proses
Pertama-tama jika membicarakan filsafat sebagai produk, alangkah
baiknya kita mengetahui apa itu ilmu terlebih dahulu karena filsafat sebagai
produk berkaitan dengan ilmu, karena seperti yang telah kita ketahui filsafat
adalah induk dari segala ilmu.
Pada zaman yunani kuno, ilmu dengan filsafat sukar dipisahkan.
Pembuktian empirik kurang mendapat perhatian dan metode ilmiah tampaknya
belum berkembang. Sedikit demi sedikit, dengan makin berkembangnya
penalaran dan metode ilmiah, dengan makin kuatnya dan makin dihargainya
pembuktian empirik, dan seiring dengan itu, makin meluasnya penggunaan
instrumen penelitian, satu per satu cabang cabang ilmu mulai melepasakan diri
dari filsafat. pada waktu merupakan bagian dari filsafat, definisi ilmu bergantung
pada sistem filsafat yang dianut, sedangkan sewaktu posisi ilmu lebih bebas dan
lebih mandiri, definisi ilmu umumnya didasarkan pada apa yang dikerjakan oleh
ilmu itu dengan melihat metode yang digunakannya. Berkembanglah ilmu-ilmu
alamiah dan ilmu-ilmu sosial. Astronomi, anggota ilmu-ilmu alamiah, merupakan
salah satu ilmu yang pertama-tama melepaskan diri dari filsafat, sedangkan
psikolog, anggota ilmu-ilmu sosial, termasuk yang terakhir melepaskan diri dari
filsafat (conny, 2010 : 135-136).
Ilmu dan filsafat sangat berkaitan seperti yang disinggung diatas, baik
secara ilmunya atau pun isinya, karena dari filsafat yang menghasilkan berbagai
macam penelitian atau pemikiran yang menghasilkan berbagai ilmu yang ada pada
saat ini dan ilmu-ilmu tersebut memisahkan diri dari filsafat.
Pada dasarnya, setiap ilmu memiliki dua macam objek, yaitu objek
material dan objek formal, objek material adalah sesuatu yang dijadikan sasaran
penyelidikan. Filsafat sebagai proses berfikir yang sistematis dan radikal juga
memiliki objek material dan objek formal. Objek material filsafat adalah segala
yang ada. Segala yang ada yang terlihat maupun yang transdental. Adapun objek
formal filsafat adalah sudut pandang yang menyeluruh, radikal dan rasional
tentang segala yang ada. (amsal, 2013 : 1)
Suatu pengetahuan termasuk ilmu atau pengetahuan ilmiah apabila
pengetahuan itu dan cara memperolehnya telah memenuhi syarat-syarat tertentu..
Bila syarat-syarat belum terpenuhi, maka suatu pengetahuan dapat digolongkan ke
dalam pengetahuan lain yang bukan ilmu, walau juga tidak usah termasuk filsafat.
(conny, 2010 : 136)

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 Syarat-syarat diakuinya sebuah ilmu:
1. Dasar pembenaran. Dasar pembenaran mengharuskan seluruh cara kerja
ilmiah diarahkan untuk memperoleh derajat kepastian yang setinggi mungkin
pada pengetahuan yang dihasilkan.
2. Sitematik. Pengetahuan ilmiah bersifat sistematik
3. Intersubjektif

Mengingat perkembangan ilmu yang begitu pesat sejak awal abad ke 20

menjadi berbagai disiplin ilmu dan cabang cabang disiplin ilmu, yang didampingi
oleh perkembangan dan penyempurnaan berbagai metode penelitian.
Dilihat diatas filsafat sebagai produk, produk sebuah ilmu yang
menghasilkan banyak pengetahuan dari mulai ontologi, epistemologi, teologi, dan
aliran aliran yang banyak menghasilkan ilmu juga seperti rasionalisme,
empirisme, dan lain sebagainya.
Jika tadi diterangkan bahwa filsafat sebagai produk yang bisa
menajdikan banyak pengetahuan, maka sekarang filsafat sebagai proses, proses
pembuatan, pemikiran, pengalaman dan lain sebagainya.
Dari pertumbuhan ilmu sejak zaman yunani kuno sampai abad modern
ini tampak nyata bahwa ilmu merupakan aktifitas manusia suatu kegiatan
melakukan sesuatu yang dilafazkan orang atau lebih tepat suatu rangkaian
aktifitas yang membentuk proses. Rankaian aktivitas itu bersifat rasional, kognitif,
dan teleologis.
Adapun aktifitas rasional berarti kegiatan yang mengunakan kemampuan
fikiran untuk menalar. Adapun yang berbeda dengan aktivitas kegiatan
berdasarkan perasaan atau naluri, ilmu menampakkan diri sebagai kegiatan
penalaran logis dari pengamatan empiris.
Berpangkal pada hasrat komunituf dan kebutuhan intelektualnya,
manusia melakukan rangkaian kegiatan pemikiran rasional yang selanjutnya
melahirkan suatu ilmu. Yang dimaksud pemikiran rasional iayalah pemikiran
yang mematuhi kaidah-kaidah logika, baik logika tradisional maupun modern.
Adaapun fungsi pengetahuan atau komunitif bagi ilmu yaitu
memusatkan perhatian terkuat pada pemahaman kaidah-kaidah ilmiah. Jadi pada
dasarnya ilmu adalah sebuah proses yang bersifat komunitif, bertalian tentang
proses mengetahui dan pengetahuan. Proses komunitif yaitu rangkaian aktifitas
seperti pengenalan pencerapan,pengkonsepsian dan penalaran.
Adapun aktivitas teleologis bertujuan untuk mencapai kebenaran,
memperoleh pemahaman,memberikan penjelasan, melakukan penerapan melalui
peramalan atau pengendalian.
Jadi filsafat sebuah proses disini menerangkan bahwa dari pemikiran
atau sebuah pengalaman yang bersifat dipikirkan karena ke ingin tahuan seorang

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 filosof akan kebenaran dan kebajikan menjadikan proses dari adanya filsafat ini
banyak menghasilkan ilmu yang sekarang banyak di telaah dikaji dan biasanya
orang menyebut filsafat dengan sebutan induk dari segala ilmu, bila dilihat dari
kaca proses tersebut, memang benar filsafat adanya menajdikan sumber dari
berbagai ilmu.
Tampaknya semakin lama-kelamaan filsafat memproses banyak adanya
produk ilmu yang dahulu sebagian dari aliran aliran filsafat sekarang dari aliran-
aliran itu menjadi banyak ilmu dan metode untuk menggali sesuatu yang belum
ditemukan dan melihat realita yang ada.

B. Keterkaitan filsafat sebagai produk dengan filsafat sebagai proses

Telah dijelaskan diatas bahwa terlihat keterkaitan antaran filsafat sebagai
produk dan filsafat sebagai proses, tampaknya dua-duanya adalah bagian dari diri
filsafat itu sendiri sebagai produk dan dilain itu ada proses yang menghasilkan
produknya.
Jika dilihat dari produk yang sudah jadi yaitu ilmu dan filsafatnya sendiri
bisa dilihat bahwa, keduanya adanya keterhubungan antara ilmu yang lahir dari
produk filsafat dan mempunyai proses, contohnya,ilmu yang berbasis
rasionalisme dan empirisisme. Dengan berfikir menggunakan rasio orang bisa
mengembangkan imajinasinya menjadikan sebuah karya dan dari itu bisa menjadi
ilmu, akan tetapi rasionalisme sangat mengagungkan akal untuk mendapatkan
pengetahuannya. Sedangkan dari empirisisme sendiri menyusun pengetahuan dari
penalaran induktif, penalaran induktif adalah cara berfikir dengan menarik
kesimpulan umum dari pengamatan atas gejala-gejala yang bersifat
khusus.misalnya atas pengamatan logam besi, alumunium, tembaga, atau realita
yang ada.
Kedua duanya terlihat memang sangat berkaitan antara filsafat produk
dan proses, sehingga tidak bisa dipungkiri jika hanya satu yang dipelajari akan
tetapi satunya lagi tidak diketahui, karena segala sesuatu yang ada dialam pasti
ada prosesnya dalam hal bidang ilmu.

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