Chapter 3 - Collingwood and the New Pragmatists on Socially Situated Knowledge

Summary

While there are affinities between Collingwood’s views and pragmatism, their shared considerations of the socio-historical dimensions of scientific knowledge have not been explored thus far. This chapter aims to fill this gap by comparing Collingwood’s views from An Essay on Metaphysics with pragmatist stances in contemporary philosophy of science by Philip Kitcher and Hasok Chang. In addition to similarities regarding the importance of the purposes of inquiry and framing knowledge in relation to a system of practice, there are disagreements between Collingwood and this strand of pragmatism regarding truth, propositional knowledge, and drawing out political implications. I argue that Collingwood’s approach can supply tools that can assist the pragmatist goals of improving scientific practice, mainly through analyzing cases from the history of science. This warrants mapping Collingwood’s place in twentieth-century philosophy as a precursor to recent attempts to overcome the clash between logical and historical approaches to scientific knowledge.