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 career of continental drift theory: An application of Imre Lakatos' analysis of scientific growth to the rise of drift theory

The continental drift research programme reigns supreme within the geological community. The programme achieved its regal status only within the last decade. Its ascension to the summit took over fifty years, and required numerous switchbacks. Although its climb may seem haphazard, I argue that there is an overall rationale to its development which is partially elucidated by the account of scientific growth and change as put forth by Imre Lakatos. However, at least two alterations must be made in Lakatos' analysis. One concerns his analysis of ‘novel fact’, and the other is concerned with his thesis that the hard core of a research programme remains the same throughout the programme's lifetime. I consider and reject Elie Zahar's notion of ‘novel fact’, introduce an alternative notion of ‘novel fact’, and argue that Lakatos and his followers must abandon the thesis that a research programme's hard core is immune from change, but that they can do so without endangering Lakatos' overall account of scientific growth and change.     

Kitcher''s Compromise: A critical examination of the Compromise Model of scientific closure, and its implications for the relationship between history and philosophy of science

In The Advancement of Science (1993) Philip Kitcher develops what he calls the ‘Compromise Model’ of the closure of scientific debates. The model is designed to acknowledge significant elements from ‘Rationalist’ and ‘Antirationalist’ accounts of science, without succumbing to the one-sidedness of either. As part of an ambitious naturalistic account of scientific progress, Kitcher's model succeeds to the extent that transitions in the history of science satisfy its several conditions. 1 critically evaluate the Compromise Model by identifying its crucial assumptions and by attempting to apply the model to a major transition in the history of biology: the rejection of ‘naive group selectionism’ in the 1960s. I argue that the weaknesses and limitations of Kitcher's model exemplify general problems facing philosophical models of scientific change, and that recognition of these problems supports a more modest vision of the relationship between historical and philosophical accounts of science.     

Constitutive relevance in cognitive science: The case of eye movements and cognitive mechanisms

In this paper I assess whether the recently proposed “No De-Coupling” (NDC) theory of constitutive relevance in mechanisms is a useful tool to reconstruct constitutive relevance investigations in scientific practice. The NDC theory has been advanced as a framework theoretically superior to the mutual manipulability (MM) account of constitutive relevance in mechanisms but, in contrast to the MM account, has not yet been applied to detailed case studies. I argue that the NDC account is also applicable to empirical practice and that it fares better than the MM account on both theoretical and empirical grounds. I elaborate these claims in terms of applications of the NDC theory to two case studies of cognitive science research on the role of eye movements in mechanisms for cognitive capacities.     

The relationship between cell division and cell specialization in the mouse intestinal epithelium

Zusammenfassung Der Zusammenhang zwischen der Teilung von Ursprungszellen und der Differenzierung ihrer Tochterzellen wurde anhand von Epithelzellen des Duodenums weisser Mäuser untersucht. Um den Zustand des «steady state» zu erhalten, finden die folgenden Arten von Teilung der Ursprungszellen statt: 1) zwei neue Ursprungszellen; 2) zwei differenzierte Tochterzellen; oder 3) eine neue Ursprungszelle und eine differenzierte Tochterzelle.

---

---

I wish to particularly thank Mrs. Z.Trirogoff for her skilled technical assistance. This work was supported in part by Research Grant No. GM 14749-01, National Institutes of Health and General Research Support Funds, UCLA School of Medicine. Portions of this work were presented before the American Association of Anatomists, Anat. Rec.157, 333 (1967).     

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