Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 52:55-66 (2015)
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This paper presents a survey of the literature on the problem of contingency in science. The survey is structured around three challenges faced by current attempts at understanding the conflict between “contingentist” and “inevitabilist” interpretations of scientific knowledge and practice. First, the challenge of definition: it proves hard to define the positions that are at stake in a way that is both conceptually rigorous and does justice to the plethora of views on the issue. Second, the challenge of distinction: some features of the debate suggest that the contingency issue may not be sufficiently distinct from other philosophical debates to constitute a genuine, independent philosophical problem. And third, the challenge of decidability: it remains unclear whether and how the conflict could be settled on the basis of empirical evidence from the actual history of science. The paper argues that in order to make progress in the present debate, we need to distinguish more systematically between different expressions that claims about contingency and inevitability in science can take. To this end, it introduces a taxonomy of different contingency and inevitability claims. The taxonomy has the structure of an ordered quadruple. Each contingency and each inevitability claim contains an answer to the following four questions: (how) are alternatives to current science possible, what types of alternatives are we talking about, how should the alternatives be assessed, and how different are they from actual science?
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DOI | 10.1016/j.shpsa.2015.05.013 |
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References found in this work BETA
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life.Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer - 1985 - Princeton University Press.
A Theory of Conditionals.Robert C. Stalnaker - 1968 - In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Studies in Logical Theory (American Philosophical Quarterly Monographs 2). Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 98-112.
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Citations of this work BETA
Inevitability, Contingency, and Epistemic Humility.Ian James Kidd - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 55:12-19.
So close no matter how far: counterfactuals in history of science and the inevitability/contingency controversy.Luca Tambolo - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2111-2141.
The Tragedy of the Canon; or, Path Dependence in the History and Philosophy of Science.Agnes Bolinska & Joseph D. Martin - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 89:63-73.
Presidential Address: Experimenting with the Scientific Past.Gregory Radick - 2016 - British Journal for the History of Science 49 (2):153-172.
Could Science Be Interestingly Different?Veli Virmajoki - 2018 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 12 (2):303-324.
View all 12 citations / Add more citations
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