In recent years there has been a revival of the debate about the relation between history and philosophy of science. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion by approaching the issue from a new angle. To rethink the relation between the two domains of study, I apply an important insight about scientific practice to the practice of integrating the history and philosophy of science: the insight that the scientific paper does not give a faithful account of the actual research (...) pursued in the laboratory or in the field. Arguably, the scholarly article about science is also not a transparent window to the activity of producing such an article. But if it is not, we need to redirect our attention. If we want to understand the nature and merits of integrating the history and philosophy of science, we need to examine both the actual activity of integrating and the scholarly paper produced by it. To consider what one can learn from such an inquiry, I reflect on my own activity of studying scientific justification through the combination of historical and philosophical analysis. Probing a concrete historical episode, micro-anatomical research on the retina in the 19th century, I pursue two related questions, the first-order question, 'What exactly is scientific justification in the given case?' and the meta-question, 'How do I go about analysing justificatory practices?' I then characterise the nature of my analysis and consider what can be learned from the study of the practice of integrating the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the relevance of the view of cognitive existentialism to a multi-gendered picture of science education. I am opposing both the search for a particular feminist standpoint epistemology and the reduction of philosophy of science to cultural studies of scientific practices as championed by supporters of postmodern political feminism. In drawing on the theory of gender plurality and the conception of dynamic objectivity, the paper suggests a way of treating the nexus between the construction of gender (...) within the interrelatedness of scientific practices and the constitution of particular objects of inquiry. At stake is the notion of characteristic hermeneutic situation which proves to be helpful in designing a multi-gendered pedagogy as well. (shrink)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1996.