Moderate Historicism and the Empirical Sense of ‘Good Science’

Extract

Much recent discussion has been devoted to questions concerning what role considerations of the history of science should play in developing and evaluating philosophical analyses of science. It is generally, if not universally, conceded that the philosopher of science must appeal in some way to actual scientific practice and to the historical development of actual science if his analysis is to have any content, and it has been argued (Achinstein 1977) that even the most “ahistorical” of the positivists made, or presupposed, such an appeal.

It is now fairly common to distinguish two polar positions regarding the relation of history to philosophy of science: radical logicism is the doctrine that an appeal to actual scientific practice or to the history of science can never serve to refute any philosophical analysis of scientific concepts, while radical historicism is the view that really there is nothing more to the philosophy of science than historical description and analysis (i.e., that conformation to the history of science is always the determining factor in evaluating the adequacy of a philosophical analysis of science).