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History and Philosophy of Science: A Marriage of Convenience?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Ernan McMullin
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Extract

In a recent article, Ronald Giere has argued that the currently fashionable union of history and philosophy of science is no more than a marriage of convenience, justified like so many youthful marriages by unhappiness with the parental homes – history and philosophy rather than by compatibility and mutual need. He allows that it is, for the moment at least, a convenience from the institutional standpoint to encourage the two to pair off together, but insists that this pairing has no “strong conceptual rationale.” In a session devoted to analyzing the directions in which philosophy of science is developing, this topic would seem to merit an important place, for it can hardly be gainsaid that one of the two most obvious shifts in the philosophy of science over the past fifteen years has been its growing involvement with the history of science; the other shift is, of course, the shift away from the empiricist orthodoxies inherited from the Vienna Circle.

Type
Symposium: Development of the Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1974 , 1974 , pp. 585 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

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References

Notes

1 ‘History and Philosophy of Science: Intimate Relationship or Marriage of Convenience’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24 (1973), 282-297; see p. 296.

2 ‘The History and Philosophy of Science: A Taxonomy’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 4 (ed. by R., Stuewer), pp. 12-67Google Scholar. Giere’s essay is a detailed review of this volume, and specifically of this article.

3 Loc. cit.

4 I have touched briefly on (3) in ‘History and Philosophy of Science: A Taxonomy’, pp. 63-67.

5 In a well-known exegesis of the Popperian canon, Lakatos distinguished between three different sorts of falsificationism, “dogmatic” (the straightforward logicist model defined above), “naive methodological” (a strongly conventionalist view), and “sophisticated methodological” (his own view, and one which has justificationist elements). See ‘The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’ Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (ed. by I., Lakatos and A., Musgrave), Cambridge, 1970, pp. 91-195Google Scholar.

6 Errol, Harris, ‘Epicyclic Popperism’ BJPS 23 (1972), 55-67Google Scholar.

7 See, for instance, J. R., Platt, ‘Strong Inference: The New Baconians’ Science 146 (1964), 347-353Google Scholar; P., Medawar, The Art of the Soluble, London 1967Google Scholar.

8 See A, Musgrave, ‘Logical versus Historical Theories of Confirmation’ BJPS 25 (1974), 1-23Google Scholar; Zahar, E. G., ‘Why did Einstein’s Programme Supersede Lorentz’s?’, BJPS 24 (1973), 95-123; 223-262.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 By calling theories of confirmation that take this temporal distinction into account “historical,” Musgrave (op. cil.) would seem to be suggesting this, but a closer look at his well-reasoned essay shows that the principles of confirmation he discusses do not depend especially heavily on a review of historical instances of confirmation. It would have been better for him to retain his first label, ‘logico-historical’ because his analysis does not come down more on one side than the other.

10 One section of my paper: ‘Logicality and Rationality: a Comment on Toulmin’s Theory of Science’ (Boston Studies XI (1974), pp. 415-430) is devoted to this issue.

11 Musgrave, op. cit.

12 Toulmin makes the concept correspond to the individual organism (the entitity in which mutations may occur and which competes with other broadly similar entities for survival). He also tends to take a “discipline” (“characterized by its own body of concepts, methods, and fundamental aims“) to correspond to a species: “if intellectual disciplines comprise historically-developing populations of concepts, as organic species do of organisms, we may then consider how the interplay of innovative and selective factors maintains their characteristic unity and continuity.” (Human Understanding, Princeton, 1972, pp. 139-141). Competition occurs both between species, and between individual members of species, thus presumably between disciplines as a whole and between individual concepts in each discipline.

13 In the Postscript to the second edition of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1970.

14 See § 5 ‘History of science and some philosophers’ of my ‘History and Philosophy of Science: A Taxonomy.’