Lorenzo Peña «The Boundary between Scientific and Non-Scientific Knowledge»

The boundary between scientific and non-scientific knowledge does exist. Some irrationalists have wrongly concluded that anything goes because they have noticed how difficult it is to draw a boundary. Such a boundary is not an imaginary one, though. Besides what is scientific and what is unscientific there also is what lies at the boundary, certain research practices which are neither wholly scientific nor fully unscientific. Studying what is science is itself a kind of research belonging to the boundary, since the methods available in that research are not as strictly rigorous as those used in science proper; in fact, all of philosophy is included in the boundary in question. The boundary (and in fact science itself) displays a characteristic structure pertaining to what are by now usually called «non-wellfounded sets»; thus the best way of approaching philosophy of science is not standard set-theory. Admission of the boundary's existence compels us to go beyond standard classical logic and to look for a more suitable logic, as for instance some kind of fuzzy paraconsistent logic.