truth value of a fact, whereupon the corresponding judgment (and the concept related to this judgment) turns out to be meaningless from a truly scientific point of view. See, for example the humanities where emotions are substituted for facts.401 Hägerström’s view on the structure of scientific argumentation does not seem to differ from the prevailing view of his day and age, for instance, that of the Cambridge and Wiener schools.402 And parallel to the birth of the Uppsala School, in Sweden the scientific study of History was the subject of an intense methodological discussion at the beginning of the 20th Century when the brothers and professors of history Lauritz Weibull (1873-1960) and Curt Weibull (1886-1991) rose to the methodological challenge, sharpening the demands of historical method, subjecting various traditional historical facts and truths to methodological scrutiny, eventually removing these “facts” from the real to the mythical.403 In any case, the age of speculative science had by then become a part of the past, and science in general strived to emulate, if not mimic, the methods of the hard sciences.404 Scientific argumentation and demonstration is a discourse that depends upon the presence of facts, the purpose of which it is to support and substantiate subsequent inferences and conclusions. Scientific argumentation thus constitutes adiscourse whose task it is to arrive at judgments and propositions about reality that are possible to verify or falsify.To Hägerström, the concepts and notions of science thus play an instrumental role since these categories are of crucial importance when it comes to the determination of the facts that underlie the scientific inferences and conclusions p a r t i 1 , c h a p t e r 7 168 7. 7 sci ent i f ic argumentat ion 401 Hägerström, Selbstdarstellungen, p. 48. However, Ernst Cassirer objects that Hägerström’s condemnation over the humanities is too strict, disregarding the advances in various fields of research. Cassirer, Hägerström, pp. 109-119. 402 Marc-Wogau, Studier till Axel Hägerströms filosofi, pp. 17, 37-50; Martin, Legal realism, American and Scandinavian, p. 126;Wedberg, Historia 3, p. 366. 403 Frängsmyr, Svensk idéhistoria 2, pp. 239-244. 404 Cf.Wedberg, Historia 3, pp. 13-27; Frängsmyr, Svensk idéhistoria 2, pp. 235-239.
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