One of the most widely debated and influential implications of the “demise” of positivism was the realization, now a commonplace, that philosophy of science must be firmly grounded in an understanding of the history of science, and/or of contemporary scientific practice. While the nature of this alliance is still a matter of uneasy negotiation, the principle that philosophical analysis must engage “real” science has transformed philosophical practice in innumerable ways. For one thing, it has led to a systematic questioning, indeed, in the view of many, the dismantling, of “unity” theses and the presumption that the sciences embody a common rational core that philosophers can reasonably expect to “reconstruct.” As HPS practitioners have scrutinized particular sciences, their diversity has come more clearly into focus and this has generated, in turn, vigorous programs of research that take an increasingly wide range of “special” sciences—including various life sciences, earth sciences, and social sciences—as a legitimate primary focus of concern.

Two important components of Fodor's philosophy of cognitive science rely heavily upon ceteris paribus laws, thus requiring that Fodor forward an analysis of ceteris paribus laws. First, because Fodor has long held (1975, 1990) that all of the laws of the special sciences are ceteris paribus laws, he must demonstrate the scientific legitimacy of ceteris paribus laws. Second, ceteris paribus laws play a prominent role in Fodor's most recent (1990) theory of representational content, and solution to the “disjunction problem,” a well-known problem for his approach. Fodor recently (1991a) offered an analysis of ceteris paribus laws for the special sciences (particularly cognitive science). I ask two questions with regard to Fodor's analysis: Does the analysis underwrite Fodor's theory of representation? Does the analysis provide adequate solutions to the problems for ceteris paribus laws as articulated by Hempel (1965, 1988) and Giere (1988)? I answer both questions negatively.

In this paper I sketch the project undertaken in my forthcoming book, Engaging Science (Rouse, 1995). This sketch inevitably sacrifices detail and argument, but I hope there is a commensurate gain from giving a sense of how the various aspects of the project hang together. The project itself has two parts: first, a criticism or what I call the “legitimation project” in philosophy and sociology of science; second, my treatment of some of the philosophical issues raised by an alternative approach to interdisciplinary science studies that I call cultural studies of science. I discuss the legitimation project only briefly, however, to set the stage for a discussion of the constructive alternative.

The legitimation project is characterized by the belief that the epistemic standing and the cultural authority of the sciences are in need of a general justification, and that what can appropriately provide such justification (or show its impossibility) is to ascertain the general aim of the sciences as such, or the general nature of science as a practice or achievement.

All of us defer to the authority of experts. Living in a world of increasing specialization we find that deferral to experts is integral to even the most mundane habits of our ordinary life. I regularly complain about mistakes in meteorologist's forecasts, yet I still carry an umbrella when rain is predicted, even when a glance outside reveals that there is not a cloud in the sky. If I develop a rash on my arm and the doctor says that it is nothing more than an allergic reaction, I do not ask her to list all the evidence and reasoning that led her to that conclusion, but trust her judgment and get on with my day. Now, while we defer to experts as a matter of course, we often do so with a measure of resentment and fear.

If it were possible, I suspect that most of us would rather govern what we do according to our own good reasons rather than expert authority.

It is common practice to reject a justification out-of-hand if the argument that yields the justification is circular. Here are two recent examples. Siegel, criticizing Giere's (1988) proposal for a naturalistic philosophy of science, lists a number of questions about the justification relation between evidence and theory. Siegel then maintains that any attempt to provide a scientific account of this relation must fail:

For once I find myself in the unusual position of disagreeing with Joe Rouse for I do not think that science studies can or should be simply “modeled’ after cultural studies as he has suggested. Instead I will argue for a stronger relationship between science studies and cultural studies that follows historically, if not logically from the progression from HPS to science studies and thence to the cultural study of scientific knowledge. The endpoint of the cultural study of scientific knowledge, at least as I will locate it in this paper and elsewhere, for it depends on how one locates the meaning of culture and its study, is a return to the perspective of the scientist having made roughly a 359 degree angle of departure; that one degree more or less gives the critical distance to “defamiliarize the familiar” perspective of the scientist and to “contextualize” scientific practice.

The aim of contemporary cognitive neuropsychology is to articulate the functional architecture underlying normal human cognitive abilities, on the basis of patterns of performance over a variety of cognitive tasks involving subjects with varying degrees of brain-damage. An example of a contemporary functional architecture is the following model for the recognition and production of spoken and written words:

The modular processing components in this ‘box-and-arrow’ functional architecture represent functionally independent subsystems that perform computational transformations on the representations that originate as input along the connecting links, providing a theory of cognition at the algorithmic and representational level (not the implementational or ‘hardware’ level).

This essay is about science studies: history, philosophy and sociology of science, etc. My interest is in where the field is now and where I would like it go. Taking my cue from actor-network theory, my central theme is agency—questions of who acts? who does what to whom, how and why? And to develop this theme I contrast two different idioms for thinking about science—two different metaphysics—which I call the representational and the performative idioms.

Psychology is a scientific discipline whose universe of discourse is the mind. What could be so controversial about that? Plenty; and (almost) all of the controversy involves questions about the scope of mind. The traditional view on this matter is most closely associated with Descartes. Though Descartes supposed that the mind is essentially nonmaterial, this dualism is not a part of the legacy Descartes left to the modern student of mind. What modern cognitive science has inherited from Descartes is the view that the mind is a private place, separated (in a number of respects) from the body and the environment that lies outside the physical boundries on an individual. There is, however, a rising tide within the philosophy of psychology that seeks to push the boundries of the mind outside the skin (or at least the cranium).

This session is about the future of philosophy of science, one of a series of negotiations occasioned by the suggestion that philosophy of science must engage, not only the history of science and/or contemporary scientific practice but also the challenge, raised by social scientists, of seeing science as essentially a cultural and dynamic activity. The session is timely because these negotiations are well underway. Many philosophers of science are already committed to an inter-disciplinary eclecticism that has generated a heterogeneous family of science studies programs and projects, all designed to situate science in its social, historical, and politico-economic contexts, but each with its own sense of what shape inter-disciplinary science studies research will take in the coming years. Philosophers who favor this new disciplinary eclecticism face many problems if they are to successfully forge a hybrid science studies that does not violate their integrity as philosophers.

Marr's theory of vision (1982) is often said to exemplify wide psychology. The claim rests primarily on Marr's appeal to a high level theory of computational functions and secondarily on the sort of representations he posits for computational processes (Burge 1986, 28). I agree that Marr's theory embodies an exemplary form of wide psychology; what is exemplary about it is his appeal to perceptual tasks. But I shall argue that the result of invoking task considerations is that we need not adhere to Marr's own restricted construal of proper width. Indeed, the larger conclusion I want to draw is that there is no single conception of width that has a special place in explanation.

Against the traditional ‘discovery-view’ of experiments, Hacking has maintained that in experimental practice natural phenomena are created, not discovered. By intervening in the world with the help of technology, we create and at the same time come to know phenomena. This claim, together with the one that scientific entities are tools for intervening in the world, undermines the classic distinction between the natural and the artificial, more particularly, between science and technology: phenomena become artifacts just as technological products and scientific entities become tools for doing. Hacking's view raises the question whether it can still be said that science studies natural phenomena, and if so, in what sense. Are we not forced to give up the distinction between the natural and the artificial, between science and technology, altogether? Recently, for instance (Lelas 1993) has argued that science is a form of technology.

The precise nature of the connection between perceptual experience and empirical knowledge is one of the traditional problems of philosophy. That much of our knowledge is somehow based on our perceptual experience has been a common element of many otherwise disparate views as to how beliefs about empirical matters are justified. Although this relationship is now often conceived to be causal rather than logical, it is still rarely doubted that there is some kind of intimate connection between experience and justified belief. Any view of this kind leads quite naturally to the idea that the function of perceptual experience in our epistemic economy is to lead to knowledge of those matters of fact that cause or are represented by that experience. Although I do not wish to deny that this is one epistemic role that experience can play, I will argue below that there are others as well.

On September 3 and 4, 1821 Michael Faraday, age 30, performed a series of experiments which ultimately produced what were called “electromagnetic rotations.” Faraday showed how an appropriately organized combination of electric and magnetic elements would produce rotary motion. He invented the first electric motor.

Faraday's work resulted in several “products.” He published several papers describing his discovery (Faraday 1821; 1821-2; 1822c). He wrote letters to many scientific colleagues (Faraday 1812-48, pp. 122-39). He built, or had built, several copies of an apparatus which, requiring no experimental knowledge or dexterity on the part of its user, would display the notable rotations (Faraday 1822a; 1822b). He shipped these to his scientific colleagues (Faraday 1812-48, pp. 128-9). It is this material product which I would like to focus on.

For the presentation of this talk in New Orleans, I intended to have my own version of Faraday's first electric motor.

David Marr's theory of vision has been a source of both fascination and confusion for many in cognitive science. There has, of course, been substantial technical interest in the particulars of Marr's model. But beyond this we have seen his work cited in debates about the nature of mental representation and computation, the structure of cognition, the role of theoretical knowledge in perception, how and indeed whether one ought to apply results from cognitive science to antecedent questions in epistemology. Marr's theory is cited in such debates because it is widely seen as a successful, rigorous account of a large scale cognitive/perceptual process (if not as the successful such account). But it has been suggested that Marr's theory might be mistaken as a whole; that Marr might have been wrong not just about one or several of the sub-mechanisms of vision, and not just in offering an incomplete account, but wrong in his basic approach to the study of vision.