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Psychological, Social, and Epistemic Factors in the Theory of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Alvin I. Goldman
Alvin I. Goldman*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Extract

Traditional philosophy of science concentrated on logic and methodology, dismissing psychology and sociology as irrelevant (except for the context of discovery). Recent movements to ‘naturalize’ philosophy of science have reinstated psychological and social factors repudiated by the tradition, but these two types of factors have mostly been addressed independently and by different authors. Most cognitive approaches (e.g., Thagard 1989a, 1992; Churchland 1989) pursue the microcognition of science in abstraction from the social, and most sociologists of science ignore, post pone, or reject cognitive explanations of science (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 280). More recently, however, several philosophers of science have urged a blending of the cognitive and the social (Thagard 1993, in press, Solomon 1992, 1994a, 1994b, Kitcher 1993, Giere 1988), and this paper has a similar thrust. I shall not endorse a reduction of the social to the psychological, but a substantial overlap or intermingling of the two.

Type
Part IX. Integrating Cognitive and Social Models of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 276 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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