Do the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science Have Anything to Say to Each Other?

Extract

This symposium was sparked by a rather sad editorial by Larry Laudan in the twentyyear issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Laudan, one of the founders of that joumal, was weeping at the decline of the wonderful post-Kuhnian Spring of the late 1960s into the arid “social constructivist” autumn of the late 1980s. When once it had seemed that philosophers and historians of science would walk forward together, sweeping aside the ahistoricism of neo-positivists and the whiggishness of traditional history of science (generally written by retired scientists), now philosophers go alone while historians have been seduced by the fruity charms of the relativists and sociologists.