Negotiating history: Contingency,canonicity, and case studies

Objections to the use of historical case studies for philosophical ends fall into two categories. Methodological objections claim that historical accounts and their uses by philosophers are subject to various biases. We argue that these challenges are not special; they also apply to other epistemic practices. Metaphysical objections, on the other hand, claim that historical case studies are intrinsically unsuited to serve as evidence for philosophical claims, even when carefully constructed and used, and so constitute a distinct class of challenge. We show that attention to what makes for a canonical case can address these problems. A case study is canonical with respect to a particular philosophical aim when the features relevant to that aim provide a reasonably complete causal account of the results of the historical process under investigation. We show how to establish canonicity by evaluating relevant contingencies using two prominent examples from the history of science: Eddington’s confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity using his data from the 1919 eclipse and Watson and Crick’s determination of the structure of DNA.     

Value-entanglement and the integrity of scientific research

Throughout much of the 20th century, philosophers of science maintained a position known as the value-free ideal, which holds that non-epistemic (e.g., moral, social, political, or economic) values should not influence the evaluation and acceptance of scientific results. In the last few decades, many philosophers of science have rejected this position by arguing that non-epistemic values can and should play an important role in scientific judgment and decision-making in a variety of contexts, including the evaluation and acceptance of scientific results. Rejecting the value-free ideal creates some new and vexing problems, however. One of these is that relinquishing this philosophical doctrine may undermine the integrity of scientific research if practicing scientists decide to allow non-epistemic values to impact their judgment and decision-making. A number of prominent philosophers of science have sought to show how one can reject the value-free ideal without compromising the integrity of scientific research. In this paper, we examine and critique their views and offer our own proposal for protecting and promoting scientific integrity. We argue that the literature on research ethics and its focus on adherence to norms, rules, policies, and procedures that together promote the aims of science can provide a promising foundation for building an account of scientific integrity. These norms, rules, policies, and procedures provide a level of specificity that is lacking in most philosophical discussions of science and values, and they suggest an important set of tasks for those working in science and values—namely, assessing, justifying, and prioritizing them. Thus, we argue that bringing together the literature on research ethics with the literature on science and values will enrich both areas and generate a more sophisticated and detailed account of scientific integrity.     

Chemistry in the French tradition of philosophy of science: Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard

At first glance twentieth-century philosophy of science seems virtually to ignore chemistry. However this paper argues that a focus on chemistry helped shape the French philosophical reflections about the aims and foundations of scientific methods. Despite patent philosophical disagreements between Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard it is possible to identify the continuity of a tradition that is rooted in their common interest for chemistry. Two distinctive features of the French tradition originated in the attention to what was going on in chemistry.French philosophers of science, in stark contrast with analytic philosophers, considered history of science as the necessary basis for understanding how the human intellect or the scientific spirit tries to grasp the world. This constant reference to historical data was prompted by a fierce controversy about the chemical revolution, which brought the issue of the nature of scientific changes centre stage.A second striking—albeit largely unnoticed—feature of the French tradition is that matter theories are a favourite subject with which to characterize the ways of science. Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard developed most of their views about the methods and aims of science through a discussion of matter theories. Just as the concern with history was prompted by a controversy between chemists, the focus on matter was triggered by a scientific controversy about atomism in the late nineteenth-century.     

Knowledge transfer and its contexts

Knowledge transfer across different contexts has become an increasingly prevalent feature of current science. As such, it is a relevant topic also for historians and philosophers of science. This special issue presents a set of papers that study knowledge transfer in various disciplines. The contributions approach the topic from 1) an integrated history and philosophy of science perspective, 2) a systematic philosophical perspective, or 3) a historical perspective. Taken together, they give a broad introduction into the topic and offer a set of conceptual resources for the study of knowledge transfer in multiple contexts.     

From Bacon to Banks: the vision and the realities of pursuing science for the common good

Francis Bacon's call for philosophers to investigate nature and "join in consultation for the common good" is one example of a powerful vision that helped to shape modern science. His ideal clearly linked the experimental method with the production of beneficial effects that could be used both as "pledges of truth" and for "the comforts of life." When Bacon's program was implemented in the following generation, however, the tensions inherent in his vision became all too real. The history of the Royal Society of London, from its founding in 1660 to the 42-year presidency of Joseph Banks (1778-1820), shows how these tensions led to changes in the way in which both the experimental method and the ideal of the common good were understood. A more nuanced understanding of the problems involved in recent philosophical analyses of science in the public interest can be achieved by appreciating the complexity revealed from this historical perspective.     

How to be rational about empirical success in ongoing science: The case of the quantum nose and its critics

Empirical success is a central criterion for scientific decision-making. Yet its understanding in philosophical studies of science deserves renewed attention: Should philosophers think differently about the advancement of science when they deal with the uncertainty of outcome in ongoing research in comparison with historical episodes? This paper argues that normative appeals to empirical success in the evaluation of competing scientific explanations can result in unreliable conclusions, especially when we are looking at the changeability of direction in unsettled investigations. The challenges we encounter arise from the inherent dynamics of disciplinary and experimental objectives in research practice. In this paper we discuss how these dynamics inform the evaluation of empirical success by analyzing three of its requirements: data accommodation, instrumental reliability, and predictive power. We conclude that the assessment of empirical success in developing inquiry is set against the background of a model's interactive success and prospective value in an experimental context. Our argument is exemplified by the analysis of an apparent controversy surrounding the model of a quantum nose in research on olfaction. Notably, the public narrative of this controversy rests on a distorted perspective on measures of empirical success.     

Does environmental science crowd out non-epistemic values?

While no one denies that science depends on epistemic values, many philosophers of science have wrestled with the appropriate role of non-epistemic values, such as social, ethical, and political values. Recently, philosophers of science have overwhelmingly accepted that non-epistemic values should play a legitimate role in science. The recent philosophical debate has shifted from the value-free ideal in science to questions about how science should incorporate non-epistemic values. This article engages with such questions through an exploration of the environmental sciences. These sciences are a mosaic of diverse fields characterized by interdisciplinarity, problem-orientation, policy-directedness, and ubiquitous non-epistemic values. This article addresses a frequently voiced concern about many environmental science practices: that they ‘crowd out’ or displace significant non-epistemic values by either (1) entailing some non-epistemic values, rather than others, or by (2) obscuring discussion of non-epistemic values altogether. With three detailed case studies – monetizing nature, nature-society dualism, and ecosystem health – we show that the alleged problem of crowding out emerges from active debates within the environmental sciences. In each case, critics charge that the scientific practice in question displaces non-epistemic values in at least one of the two senses distinguished above. We show that crowding out is neither necessary nor always harmful when it occurs. However, we do see these putative objections to the application of environmental science as teaching valuable lessons about what matters for successful environmental science, all things considered. Given the significant role that many environmental scientists see for non-epistemic values in their fields, we argue that these cases motivate lessons about the importance of value-flexibility (that practices can accommodate a plurality of non-epistemic values), transparency about value-based decisions that inform practice, and environmental pragmatism.     

Philosophy in the trenches: from naturalized to experimental philosophy (of science)

Recent years have seen the development of an approach both to general philosophy and philosophy of science often referred to as ‘experimental philosophy’ or just ‘X-Phi’. Philosophers often make or presuppose empirical claims about how people would react to hypothetical cases, but their evidence for claims about what ‘we’ would say is usually very limited indeed. Philosophers of science have largely relied on their more or less intimate knowledge of their field of study to draw hypothetical conclusions about the state of scientific concepts and the nature of conceptual change in science. What they are lacking is some more objective quantitative data supporting their hypotheses. A growing number of philosophers (of science), along with a few psychologists and anthropologists, have tried to remedy this situation by designing experiments aimed at systematically exploring people’s reactions to philosophically important thought experiments or scientists’ use of their scientific concepts. Many of the results have been surprising and some of the conclusions drawn from them have been more than a bit provocative. This symposium attempts to provide a window into this new field of philosophical inquiry and to show how experimental philosophy provides crucial tools for the philosopher and encourages two-way interactions between scientists and philosophers.     

Pure science and the problem of progress

How should we understand scientific progress? Kuhn famously discussed science as its own internally driven venture, structured by paradigms. He also famously had a problem describing progress in science, as problem-solving ability failed to provide a clear rubric across paradigm change—paradigm changes tossed out problems as well as solving them. I argue here that much of Kuhn’s inability to articulate a clear view of scientific progress stems from his focus on pure science and a neglect of applied science. I trace the history of the distinction between pure and applied science, showing how the distinction came about, the rhetorical uses to which the distinction has been put, and how pure science came to be both more valued by scientists and philosophers. I argue that the distinction between pure and applied science does not stand up to philosophical scrutiny, and that once we relinquish it, we can provide Kuhn with a clear sense of scientific progress. It is not one, though, that will ultimately prove acceptable. For that, societal evaluations of scientific work are needed.     

On the borderline between Science and Philosophy: A debate on determinism in France around 1880

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new interest in explosive chemical reactions, sudden release of energy in living beings, physical instabilities, and bifurcations in the solutions of differential equations drew the attention of some scholars. New concepts like triggering actions and guiding principles also emerged. Mathematicians, physicists, physiologists, and philosophers were attracted by this kind of phenomena since they raised a question about the actual existence of a strict determinism in science. In 1878 the mathematical physicist Joseph Boussinesq pointed out a structural analogy among physical instabilities, some essential features of living beings, and singular solutions of differential equations. These developments revived long-lasting philosophical debates on the problematic link between deterministic physical laws and free will. We find in Boussinesq an original and almost isolated attempt to merge mathematical, physical, biological, and philosophical issues into a complex intellectual framework. In the last decades, some philosophers of science rediscovered the connection between physical instabilities and determinism, both in the context of chaos theory, and in the debates on the Norton dome. I put forward a consistent historical reconstruction of the main issues and characters involved.     

The scientific dimensions of social knowledge and their distant echoes in 20th-century American philosophy of science

The widespread impression that recent philosophy of science has pioneered exploration of the “social dimensions of scientific knowledge” is shown to be in error, partly due to a lack of appreciation of historical precedent, and partly due to a misunderstanding of how the social sciences and philosophy have been intertwined over the last century. This paper argues that the referents of “democracy” are an important key in the American context, and that orthodoxies in the philosophy of science tend to be molded by the actual regimes of science organization within which they are embedded. These theses are illustrated by consideration of three representative philosophers of science: John Dewey, Hans Reichenbach, and Philip Kitcher.     

The benefits of acquiring interactional expertise: Why (some) philosophers of science should engage scientific communities

Philosophers of science are increasingly arguing for and addressing the need to do work that is socially and scientifically engaged. However, we currently lack well-developed frameworks for thinking about how we should engage other expert communities and what the epistemic benefits are of doing so. In this paper, I draw on Collins and Evans' concept of ‘interactional expertise’ – the ability to speak the language of a discipline in the absence of an ability to practice – to consider the epistemic benefits that can arise when philosophers engage scientific communities. As Collins and Evans argue, becoming an interactional expert requires that one ‘hang out’ with members of the relevant expert community in order to learn crucial tacit knowledge needed to speak the language. Building on this work, I argue that acquiring interactional expertise not only leads to linguistic fluency, but it also confers several ‘socio-epistemic’ benefits such as the opportunity to cultivate trust with scientific communities. These benefits can improve philosophical work and facilitate the broader uptake of philosophers' ideas, enabling philosophers to meet a variety of epistemic goals. As a result, having at least some philosophers of science acquire interactional expertise via engagement will likely enhance the diversity of epistemic capacities for philosophy of science as a whole. For some philosophers of science, moreover, the socio-epistemic benefits identified here may be more important than the ability to speak the language of a discipline, suggesting the need for a broader analysis of interactional expertise, which this paper also advances.     

The silence of the norms: The missing historiography of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

History has been disparaged since the late 19th century for not conforming to norms of scientific explanation. Nonetheless, as a matter of fact a work of history upends the regnant philosophical conception of science in the second part of the 20th century. Yet despite its impact, Kuhn’s Structure has failed to motivate philosophers to ponder why works of history should be capable of exerting rational influence on an understanding of philosophy of science. But all this constitutes a great irony and a mystery. The mystery consists of the persistence of a complete lack of interest in efforts to theorize historical explanation. Fundamental questions regarding why an historical account could have any rational influence remain not merely unanswered, but unasked. The irony arises from the fact that analytic philosophy of history went into an eclipse where it remains until this day just around the time that the influence of Kuhn’s great work began to make itself felt. This paper highlights puzzles long ignored regarding the challenges a work of history managed to pose to the epistemic authority of science, and what this might imply generally for the place of philosophy of history vis-à-vis the problems of philosophy.     

Emergent evolutionism,determinism and unpredictability

The fact that there exist in nature thoroughly deterministic systems whose future behavior cannot be predicted, no matter how advanced or fined-tune our cognitive and technical abilities turn out to be, has been well established over the last decades or so, essentially in the light of two different theoretical frameworks, namely chaos theory and (some deterministic interpretation of) quantum mechanics. The prime objective of this paper is to show that there actually exists an alternative strategy to ground the divorce between determinism and predictability, a way that is older than—and conceptually independent from—chaos theory and quantum mechanics, and which has not received much attention in the recent philosophical literature about determinism. This forgotten strategy—embedded in the doctrine called “emergent evolutionism”—is nonetheless far from being a mere historical curiosity that should only draw the attention of philosophers out of their concern for comprehensiveness. It has been indeed recently revived in the works of respected scientists.     

The past vs. the tiny: historical science and the abductive arguments for realism

Scientific realism is fundamentally a view about unobservable things, events, processes, and so on, but things can be unobservable either because they are tiny or because they are past. The familiar abductive arguments for scientific realism lend more justification to scientific realism about the tiny than to realism about the past. This paper examines both the “basic” abductive arguments for realism advanced by philosophers such as Ian Hacking and Michael Devitt, as well as Richard Boyd’s version of the inference to the best explanation of the success of science, and shows that these arguments provide less support to historical than to experimental realism. This is because unobservably tiny things can function both as unifiers of the phenomena and as tools for the production of new phenomena, whereas things in the past can only serve as unifiers of the phenomena. The upshot is that realists must not suppose that by presenting arguments for experimental realism they have thereby defended realism in general.     

French historical epistemology: Discourse,concepts, and the norms of rationality

In recent years, analytic philosophers have begun to recognize the value of the French school of historical epistemology (as embodied by figures such as Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault) for contemporary debates in the history and philosophy of science. This tradition, which some characterize as a ‘French’ approach to the philosophy of science, however, remains largely un-read by mainstream philosophers of science. This article offers an interpretation of this tradition, highlighting what the author takes to be its two central features: (i) its claim that scientific discourse is the object of epistemology and (ii) its claim that scientific concepts are the building blocks of scientific discourse.     

Renouvier and the method of hypothesis

Renouvier was among the first philosophers in France to break with the nineteenth-century inductivist tradition and defend the use of hypotheses in science. Earlier in the century, the humanistically-educated eclectic spiritualist philosophers who dominated French academic life had followed Reid in proscribing the use of hypotheses. Renouvier, who was educated in the sciences, took up the Comtean positivist alternative and developed it further. He began by defending hypotheses that anticipate laws governing the phenomena, but then eventually adopted a more liberal attitude towards hypotheses that postulate unobservable entities and processes as well. He also came to the realization that, from an epistemological point of view, all of empirical science is hypothetical. Renouvier used the tentative character of scientific knowledge as a premise from which to critique those who would claim scientific status for their social philosophies, and maintained a distinction between normative philosophical and empirical scientific inquiries.     

Will the real scientists please stand up? dead ends and live issues in the explanation of scientific knowledge

Reflection on the method of science has become increasingly thinner since Kant. If there's any upshot of that part of modern philosophy, it's that the scientists didn't have a secret. There isn't something there that's either effable or ineffable. To understand how they do what they do is pretty much like understanding how any other bunch of skilled craftsmen do what they do. Kuhn's reduction of philosophy of science to sociology of science doesn't point to an ineffable secret of success; it leaves us without the notion of the secret of success.Relativism is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps, about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional co-operative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called ‘relativists’ are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.Richard Rorty1,2     

State of the field: Are the results of science contingent or inevitable?

This paper presents a survey of the literature on the problem of contingency in science. The survey is structured around three challenges faced by current attempts at understanding the conflict between “contingentist” and “inevitabilist” interpretations of scientific knowledge and practice. First, the challenge of definition: it proves hard to define the positions that are at stake in a way that is both conceptually rigorous and does justice to the plethora of views on the issue. Second, the challenge of distinction: some features of the debate suggest that the contingency issue may not be sufficiently distinct from other philosophical debates to constitute a genuine, independent philosophical problem. And third, the challenge of decidability: it remains unclear whether and how the conflict could be settled on the basis of empirical evidence from the actual history of science. The paper argues that in order to make progress in the present debate, we need to distinguish more systematically between different expressions that claims about contingency and inevitability in science can take. To this end, it introduces a taxonomy of different contingency and inevitability claims. The taxonomy has the structure of an ordered quadruple. Each contingency and each inevitability claim contains an answer to the following four questions: (how) are alternatives to current science possible, what types of alternatives are we talking about, how should the alternatives be assessed, and how different are they from actual science?     

Collaborative explanation,explanatory roles,and scientific explaining in practice

Scientific explanation is a perennial topic in philosophy of science, but the literature has fragmented into specialized discussions in different scientific disciplines. An increasing attention to scientific practice by philosophers is (in part) responsible for this fragmentation and has put pressure on criteria of adequacy for philosophical accounts of explanation, usually demanding some form of pluralism. This commentary examines the arguments offered by Fagan and Woody with respect to explanation and understanding in scientific practice. I begin by scrutinizing Fagan's concept of collaborative explanation, highlighting its distinctive advantages and expressing concern about several of its assumptions. Then I analyze Woody's attempt to reorient discussions of scientific explanation around functional considerations, elaborating on the wider implications of this methodological recommendation. I conclude with reflections on synergies and tensions that emerge when the two papers are juxtaposed and how these draw attention to critical issues that confront ongoing philosophical analyses of scientific explanation.