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The Politics of Postmodern Philosophy of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Joseph Rouse
Joseph Rouse*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Wesleyan University
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06457.
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Abstract

Modernism in the philosophy of science demands a unified story about what makes an inquiry scientific (or a successful science). Fine's “natural ontological attitude” (NOA) is “postmodern” in joining trust in local scientific practice with suspicion toward any global interpretation of science to legitimate or undercut that trust. I consider four readings of this combination of trust and suspicion and their consequences for the autonomy and cultural credibility of the sciences. Three readings take respectively Fine's trusting attitude, his emphasis upon local practice, and his antiessentialism about science as most fundamental to NOA. A fourth, more adequate reading, prompted by recent feminist interpretations of science, offers less restrictive readings of both Fine's trust and his suspicion toward approaching science with “ready-made philosophical engines” (Fine 1986b, 177).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 607 - 627
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Mark Stone and Margaret Crouch, who offered very helpful comments upon an earlier draft of this paper; the two anonymous referees for Philosophy of Science, whose reports prompted several significant clarifications and extensions of the argument; and the audiences to whom I presented versions of it at the University of Connecticut, the College of William and Mary, and Oberlin College. The paper is an outgrowth of a presentation to Arthur Fine's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in 1987, and I thank Professor Fine and the Endowment for their support.

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