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Epistemological History: the Legacy of Bachelard and Canguilhem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Mary Tiles
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Extract

Fifteen to twenty years ago one might have been forgiven for thinking that both the philosophy and history of science constituted specialized academic backwaters, far removed from debates in the forefront of either philosophic or public attention. But times have changed; science and technology have in many ways and in many guises become central foci of public debate, whether through concern over nuclear safety, the massive price to be paid for continued research in areas such as high energy physics, the cost of high technology medicine, the spectre of genetic engineering, or the wonders of information processing and the computer revolution. At the same time that there is public questioning of the authority of expert scientific pronouncements and debate about the wisdom of courses of action proposed in the name of technology and progress, there is political pressure to direct eduction in an increasingly scientific and technological direction. But even so, in this country, the history and philosophy of science remain peripheral disciplines, not only in relation to the total academic scene but even in relation to philosophy, which is itself being academically marginalized.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 21: Contemporary French Philosophy , March 1987 , pp. 141 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1987

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References

1 Gardies, Jean-Louis, Pascal entre Eudoxe et Cantor (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984).Google Scholar

2 Balibar, Françoise, Galilée, Newton lus par Einstein: espace et relativité (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1984).Google Scholar

3 Introduction to Canguilhem, Georges, On the Normal and the Pathological, Cohen, R. S. (ed.), trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Canguilhem's work in particular concerns the life sciences and cannot but introduce the reflection that any knowledge gained in these sciences is gained by a living being; the quest for knowledge of whatever kind is specifically a life function. This puts the subject and object of knowledge in a peculiarly complex interactive relation which displaces traditional subject/object oppositions.

5 Bachelard, Gaston, Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934), 715.Google Scholar

6 Bachelard, Gaston, La Philosophie du Non, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940), 7.Google Scholar

7 Bachelard agrees with Cavaillès in repudiating the empiricists' logicism, insisting that mathematics does, in its own right, have a congitive content and thus that it makes sense to talk of progress in mathematics. In characterizing this progress Cavaillès says:

… it is not an addition to the volume produced by juxtaposition, where the old exists alongside the new, but a perpetual revision of content which both deepens and erases. Afterwards there is more than there was before, not because the later contains or even extends the earlier, but because it necessarily takes the earlier as its point of departure and bears in its content the mark, which will be different each time, of its superiority over it (Jean Cavaillès, Sur la Logique de la Science, (Paris: J. Vrin, 1947), 70.

8 It is here that Bachelard subverts the distinction between internalist and externalist epistemologies and histories of science. Internalists restrict their epistemology and history of science to the purely conceptual/cognitive level. Externalists seek to treat science by the methods of empirical sociology (the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge, as advocated by Latour or Bloor) as just another cultural phenomenon to be explained by reference to social conditions. The character of science, it is argued, is determined by the conditions of its production. Bachelard allows for the operation of social, nonconceptual factors in the formation of thought, but does not treat these as the only factors.

9 Boyer, Carl B., A History of Mathematics (New York: Wiley, 1968), 370.Google Scholar

10 Thus Bachelard says:

The historian of the sciences must take ideas as facts. The epistemologist must take facts as ideas, and insert them into a system of thought. A fact which is badly interpreted in one epoque remains a fact for the historian. It is, courtesy of the epistemologist, an obstacle it is a counter-thought (La Formation de l'esprit scientifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934: 14th edn, 1978), 17.Google Scholar

11 Sellar, C. and Yeatman, R. J. 1066 and All That, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), 37.Google Scholar

12 Bachelard, Gaston, ‘L'actualité de l'histoire des sciences’, in Lecourt, Dominique (ed.), Bachelard épistémologie: textes choisis, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971; 3rd edn, 1980), 201.Google Scholar

13 This story is brilliantly told by Henry Guerlac in his ‘Chemistry as a Branch of Physics: Laplace's Collaboration with Lavoisier’, in Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences Vol. 7, McCormmach, R., (ed.) (Princeton University Press, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 In case it should seem that this example of a lapsed science is possible only because it belongs to the archaic pre-scientific period of chemistry/theory of heat, one can point to more recent examples in the area of logic. Both Hilbert's epsilon calculus and Lesniewski's protothetic, mereology and ontology—both logical systems at variance with and competing with that of Frege and Russell, now have the status of lapsed sciences. They form no part of and have left no trace of contemporary studies in formal logic.

15 Milne, E. A., Address delivered at a meeting held at the Royal Society, 27 11 1947Google Scholar, to mark the occasion of the conferment on the Institute of the title ‘Royal’.

16 Bachelard, Gaston, op. cit., note 12, p. 203.Google Scholar