Though the publication of Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss integrative approaches. This is (...) therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with discussion of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

This book features papers on the history and philosophy of science. It also includes related reviews of recent research literature on Rudolf Carnap, Eino Kaila, Ernst Mach, and Otto Neurath. The central idea behind this volume is that this distinctive field is both historical and philosophical at the same time. Good history and philosophy of science is not just history of science into which some philosophy of science may enter. On (...) the other hand, it is neither philosophy of science into which some history of science may enter. The founding insight of this modern research discipline is that history and philosophy have a special affinity and one can effectively advance both simultaneously. The selection of contributions collected in this volume are good examples and best practices for these claims. In addition, it includes illuminating case studies. It will appeal to scholars in the history of and philosophy of science, especially history and philosophy of physics and biology, as well as economics, extended evolution, and the history of knowledge. (shrink)

This book offers an integrated historical and philosophical examination of the origin of genetics. The author contends that an integrated HPS analysis helps us to have a better understanding of the history of genetics, and sheds light on some general issues in the philosophy of science. This book consists of three parts. It begins with historical problems, revisiting the significance of the work of Mendel, de Vries, and Weldon. Then it turns to integrated HPS (...) problems, developing an exemplar-based analysis of the development and the progress in early genetics. Finally, it discusses philosophical problems: conceptual change, evidence, and theory choice. Part I lays out a new historiography, serving as a basis for the discussions in part II and part III. Part II introduces a new integrated HPS method to analyse and interpret the historiography in Part I and to re-examine the philosophical issues in Part III. Part III develops new philosophical accounts which will in turn make a better sense of the history of scientific practice more generally. This book provides a practical defence of integrated HPS: the best way to defend integrated HPS is to do it. (shrink)

Part One of the paper begins by recalling a historic conference in 1969 that argued the importance of work that would draw on both history and philosophy of science, two academic fields that had in the previous decades distanced themselves from one another. It goes on to review the rather mixed success of that appeal in the years since then and to suggest the need for a forum that would encourage work of that kind, of the sort (...) that &HPS would offer. Part Two is, in effect, a case study taking a brief look at five moments in 17th century science and noting the emergence of two rather different, but in effect complementary, conceptions of natural science at that time. (shrink)

History and Philosophy of Science. Between Description and Construction. Taking into consideration the huge amount of programs and departments in ‘History and Philosophy of Science’ (HPS), partly including also technology and sociology of science, the rather weak theoretical conceptualization of this field seems surprising. HPS is conceived of neither as a mere addition of history of science and philosophy of science, nor as a good will parallel action. Therefore, the (...) question arises about the genuine subject and method of this trans‐ and interdisciplinary field of research and teaching. The recent postulate of an “integrated HPS” indicates the need of a closer and more intrinsic cooperation and interaction between history of science and philosophy of science (covering also the social and cultural sciences) from a theoretical and practical point of view. In addition, there should be no more privileging of any part in this joint scholarly enterprise by overcoming the context of discovery and the context of justification. Some best practices and desiderata are mentioned together with the forgotten history of the philosophy of science itself. Based on the description of the scholarly field an ideal‐typical model of HPS is offered. (shrink)

The Fifth Joint Workshop on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science asked participants, “What is HPS for?” This clearly instrumental question generated a welcome spectrum of practical responses. Examples of “HPS-in-action” included the concept of complementary science, suggestions for new pedagogical strategies and investigations into the socio-political dimensions of science. On the other hand, a more theoretical underpinning did emerge in a discussion of the pros and cons of pluralism. This emphasis on pluralism not (...) only underlies complementary science, but may also provide a pragmatic working basis for developing a more active role for HPS in both science and society. (shrink)

Although macroevolution has been the subject of sustained attention in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) community, only in recent years have science educators begun to more fully engage with the topic. This chapter first explores how science educators have conceptualized macroevolution and how their perspectives align with the views from HPS. Second, it illustrates how science educators’ limited engagement with HPS scholarship on macroevolution has influenced construct delineation, measurement instrument development, and educational (...) arguments about which aspects of macroevolution are most important for students to learn. Third, it discusses how scientific debates about the causal factors responsible for macroevolutionary patterns have been exploited by creationists and have impacted the teaching of evolution. Finally, it emphasizes that the rich perspectives that HPS has to offer on the important topic of macroevolution have yet to be integrated into science education scholarship. (shrink)

We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. Natural (...) history and its descendant discipline of biological taxonomy are prime examples of sciences dedicated to creating and managing systems of ordering data. In some sense, the idea of biological taxonomy as an information science is commonplace. Perhaps it is because of its self-evidence that the information science perspective on taxonomy has not been a major theme in the history and philosophy of science. The botanist Vernon Heywood once pointed out that historians of biology, in their ‘preoccupation with the development of the sciences of botany and zoology… [have] diverted attention from the role of taxonomy as an information science’ (Heywood 1985: 11). More specifically, he argued that historians had failed to appreciate how principles and practices that can be traced to Linnaeus constituted ‘a change in the nature of taxonomy from a local or limited folk communication system and later a codified folk taxonomy to a formal system of information science [that] marked a watershed in the history of biology’ (ibid.). A similar observation could be made about twentieth-century philosophy of biology, which mostly skipped over practical and epistemic questions about information management in taxonomy. The taxonomic themes that featured in the emerging philosophy of biology literature in the second half of the twentieth century were predominantly metaphysical in orientation. This is illustrated by what has become known as the ‘essentialism story’: an account about the essentialist nature of pre- Darwinian taxonomy that used to be accepted by many historians and philosophers, and which stimulated efforts to document and interpret shifts in the metaphysical understanding of species and (natural) classification (Richards 2010; Winsor 2003; Wilkins 2009). Although contemporary debates in the philosophy of taxonomy have moved on, much discussion continues to focus on conceptual and metaphysical issues surrounding the nature of species and the principles of classification. Discussions centring on whether species are individuals, classes, or kinds have sprung up as predictably as perennials. Raucous debates have arisen even with the aim of accommodating the diversity of views: is monism, pluralism, or eliminativism about the species category the best position to take? In addition to these, our disciplines continue to interrogate what is the nature of these different approaches to classification: are they representational or inferential roles of different approaches to classification (evolutionary taxonomy, phenetics, phylogenetic systematics)? While there is still much to learn from these discussions—in which we both actively participate—our aim with this topical collection has been to seek different entrypoints and address underexposed themes in the history and philosophy of taxonomy. We believe that approaching taxonomy as an information science prompts new questions and can open up new philosophical vistas worth exploring. A twenty-first century information science turn in the history and philosophy of taxonomy is already underway. In scientific practice and in daily life it is hard to escape the imaginaries of Big Data and the constant threats of being ‘flooded with data’. In the life sciences, these developments are often associated with the socalled bioinformatics crisis that can hopefully be contained by a new, interdisciplinary breed of bioinformaticians. These new concepts, narratives, and developments surrounding the centrality of data and information systems in the biological and biomedical sciences have raised important philosophical questions about their challenges and implications. But historical perspectives are just as necessary to judge what makes our information age different from those that preceded us. Indeed, as the British zoologist Charles Godfray has often pointed out, the piles of data that are being generated in contemporary systematic biology have led to a second bioinformatics crisis, the first being the one that confronted Linnaeus in the mid-18th century (Godfray 2007). Although our aim is to clear a path for new discussions of taxonomy from an information science-informed point of view, we continue where others in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science have already trod. We believe that an appreciation of biological taxonomy as an information science raises many questions about the philosophical, theoretical, material, and practical aspects of the use and revision of biological nomenclatures in different local and global communities of scientists and citizen scientists. In particular, conceiving of taxonomy as an information science directs attention to the temporalities of managing an accumulating data about classified entities that are themselves subject to revision, to the means by which revision is accomplished, and to the semantic, material, and collaborative contexts that mediate the execution of revisions. (shrink)

Science lies at the intersection of ideas and society, at the heart of the modern human experience. The study of past science should therefore be central to our humanistic attempt to know ourselves. Nevertheless, past science is not studied as an integral whole, but from two very different and divergent perspectives: the intellectual history of science, which focuses on the development of ideas and arguments, and the social history of science, which focuses on (...) the development of science as a social undertaking within its broader contexts. There is almost universal agreement that this bifurcation of the field is lamentable, and nearly universal disagreement about where, exactly, the problem lies. In order to identify the difficulty, this paper examines the institutional histories and disciplinary philosophies that have constituted the study of past science. I argue that science history, eventually allied itself with either History or Philosophy in order to find institutional support, thereby suffering the artificial imposition of the disciplinary prejudices of its allied fields, which lead science historians to adopt either the intellectual or the social perspective. Science history must reconcile its distinctions on its own terms, as an integrated unity with its own disciplinary bounds, and apart from History and Philosophy. As a catalyst for rapprochement, the historical and philosophical examination also yields a mapping of the field of science history that can be used to locate the problematic divisions in present scholarship and to draw new disciplinary bounds. (shrink)

Although macroevolution has been the subject of sustained attention in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) community, only in recent years have science educators begun to more fully engage with the topic. This chapter first explores how science educators have conceptualized macroevolution and how their perspectives align with the views from HPS. Second, it illustrates how science educators’ limited engagement with HPS scholarship on macroevolution has influenced construct delineation, measurement instrument development, and educational (...) arguments about which aspects of macroevolution are most important for students to learn. Third, it discusses how scientific debates about the causal factors responsible for macroevolutionary patterns have been exploited by creationists and have impacted the teaching of evolution. Finally, it emphasizes that the rich perspectives that HPS has to offer on the important topic of macroevolution have yet to be integrated into science education scholarship. (shrink)

Review of the book Stadler, F. (Ed.). (2017). Integrated History and Philosophy of Science: Problems, Perspectives, and Case Studies. (Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol. 20). Vienna: Springer.

1. Biomedical sciences are fast-growing fields with unprecedented speed of research outputs, especially in the quantities of papers. Philosophers aiming to study ongoing biomedical changes face cha...

Since the 1960s, there have been many efforts to defend the relevance of History of Science to Philosophy of Science, and vice versa. For the most part, these efforts have been limited to providing an abstract rationale for a closer integration between the two fields, as opposed to showing: (a) how such an integrated work is to be produced concretely, and (b) how an integrated approach can lead us to a better understanding of past (...) and/or current science. 1 In this chapter, I argue that the most promising way to integrate the history and philosophy of science is the historicist-hermeneutic approach. I will present the main features of the historicist-hermeneutic approach, and will show, concretely, how it can provide a mutually beneficial integration of the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science. More specifically, I will employ the historicist-hermeneutic approach to elucidate one of the most problematic historical case studies in philosophy of science: namely, Jean Perrin’s argument for molecular reality, which he formulated at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

History, Philosophy and Science Teaching argues that science teaching and science teacher education can be improved if teachers know something of the history and philosophy of science and if these topics are included in the science curriculum. The history and philosophy of science have important roles in many of the theoretical issues that science educators need to address: the goals of science education; what constitutes an appropriate (...) science curriculum for all students; how science should be taught in traditional cultures; what integrated science is; how scientific literacy can be promoted; and the conflict which can occur between science curriculum and deep-seated religious or cultural values and knowledge. In part, answers to these questions hinge on views about the nature of science, views that are best informed by historical and philosophical study. Outlining the history of liberal, or contextual, approaches to the teaching of science, Michael Matthews elaborates contemporary curriculum developments that explicitly address questions about the nature and the history of science. He provides examples of classroom teaching and develops useful arguments on constructivism, multicultural science education and teacher education. The book will appeal to school and university science teachers, educators of science teachers, and historians and philosophers of science. (shrink)

The paper intends to identify some particular basic assumptions, approaches and means of proceeding, which are spontaneously shared by philosophers, sociologists and historians of science, besides the common interchange of meta-notions describing science. To this end, the specific subject matter, scope, meta-cognitive goals and methodological background of each of the three domains of science study is first outlined. Only two shared proceedings are further discussed in details: the objective attitude, called 'playing a stranger', and the historiographers' involvement (...) in demarcational problem resolution. A far-reaching prospect is finally suggested for philosophers and historiographers: methodological partnership, leading towards the elaboration of an impending integral metatheory of science. (shrink)

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)

We have previously argued that historical cases must be rendered canonical before they can plausibly serve as evidence for philosophical claims, where canonicity is established through a process of negotiation among historians and philosophers of science (Bolinska and Martin, 2020). Here, we extend this proposal by exploring how that negotiation might take place in practice. The working stock of historical examples that philosophers tend to employ has long been established informally, and, as a result, somewhat haphazardly. The composition of (...) the historical canon of philosophy of science is therefore path dependent, and cases often become stock examples for reasons tangential to their appropriateness for the purposes at hand. We show how the lack of rigor around the canonization of case studies has muddied the waters in selected philosophical debates. This, in turn, lays the groundwork for proposing ways in which they can be improved. (shrink)

According to the "confrontation model," integrated history and philosophy of science operates like an empirical science. It tests philosophical accounts of science against historical case studies much like other sciences test theory against data. However, the confrontation model's critics object that historical facts can neither support generalizations nor genuinely test philosophical theories. Here I argue that most of the model's defects trace to its usual framing in terms of two problematic accounts of empirical inference: (...) the hypothetico-deductive method and enumerative induction. This framing can be taken to suggest an unprofitable one-off confrontation between particular historical facts and general philosophical theories. I outline more recent accounts of empirical inquiry, which describe an iterative back-and-forth movement between concrete empirical exemplars to their abstract descriptions. Reframed along similar lines, the confrontation model continues to offer both conceptual insight and practical guidance for a naturalized philosophy of science. (shrink)

Alan Chalmers uses Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy as an example of the irrelevance of ‘philosophy’ to ‘science’ and criticizes my 2006 book Atoms and alchemy for overemphasizing Boyle’s successes. The present paper responds as follows: first, it argues that Chalmers employs an overly simplistic methodology insensitive to the distinction between historical and philosophical claims; second, it shows that the central theses of Atoms and alchemy are untouched by Chalmers’s criticisms; and third, it uses Boyle’s analysis of subordinate (...) causes and his debate with Henry More in the 1670s to demonstrate the inadequacy of Chalmers’s construal of the mechanical philosophy.Keywords: Robert Boyle; Alan Chalmers; Geber; Paul of Taranto; Daniel Sennert; Alchemy; Chymistry; Mechanical philosophy; Reduction to the pristine state. (shrink)

In this chapter I investigate the prospects of integrated history and philosophy of science, by examining how philosophical issues raised by “hidden entities”, entities that are not accessible to unmediated observation, can enrich the historical investigation of their careers. Conversely, I suggest that the history of those entities has important lessons to teach to the philosophy of science. Hidden entities have played a crucial role in the development of the natural sciences. Despite their (...) centrality to past scientific practice, however, several of them (e.g., phlogiston, caloric, and the ether) turned out to be fictitious. For this reason, they have figured prominently in recent debates on scientific realism. The issues I explore in this paper are entangled with those debates. I argue that our understanding of hidden entities and their role in experimental practice can be enhanced by adopting an integrated historical-cum-philosophical approach. On the one hand, philosophical reflection on the reality of those entities has a lot to gain by examining historically how they were ntroduced and investigated. On the other hand, the historical reconstruction of the careers of those entities may profit from philosophical reflection on their existence. (shrink)

In bringing together a global community of philosophers, Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science develops novel perspectives on epistemology and philosophy of science by demonstrating how frameworks from academic philosophy (e.g. standpoint theory, social epistemology, feminist philosophy of science) and related fields (e.g. decolonial studies, transdisciplinarity, global history of science) can contribute to critical engagement with global dimensions of knowledge and science. -/- Global challenges such as climate change, food production, and (...) infectious diseases raise complex questions about scientific knowledge production and its interactions with local knowledge systems and social realities. As academic philosophy provides relatively little reflection on global negotiations of knowledge, many pressing scientific and societal issues remain disconnected from core debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. -/- This book is an invitation to broaden agendas of academic philosophy by presenting epistemology and philosophy of science as globally engaged fields that address heterogeneous forms of knowledge production and their interactions with local livelihoods, practices, and worldviews. This integrative ambition makes the book equally relevant for philosophers and interdisciplinary scholars who are concerned with methodological and political challenges at the intersection of science and society. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the prospects of integrated history and philosophy of science, by examining how philosophical issues concerning experimental practice and scientific realism can enrich the historical investigation of the careers of "hidden entities", entities that are not accessible to unmediated observation. Conversely, I suggest that the history of those entities has important lessons to teach to the philosophy of science. My overall aim is to illustrate the possibility of a fruitful (...) two-way traffic between history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

The Companion Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive work to cover all the principal lines and themes of the history and philosophy of mathematics from ancient times up to the twentieth century. In 176 articles contributed by 160 authors of 18 nationalities, the work describes and analyzes the variety of theories, proofs, techniques, and cultural and practical applications of mathematics. The work's aim is to recover our mathematical heritage and show the importance of mathematics today by treating its interactions (...) with the related disciplines of physics, astronomy, engineering and philosophy. It also covers the history of higher education in mathematics and the growth of institutions and organizations connected with the development of the subject. Part 1 deals with mathematics in various ancient and non-Western cultures from antiquity up to medieval and Renaissance times. Part 2 treats developments in all the main areas of mathematics during the medieval and Renaissance periods up to and including the early 17th century. Parts 3-10 are divided into the main branches into which mathematics developed from the early 17th century onwards: calculus and mathematical analysis, logic and foundations, algebras, geometries, mechanics, mathematical physics and engineering, and probability and statistics. Parts 11-13 review the history of mathematics from an international perspective. The teaching of mathematics in higher education is examined in various countries, and mathematics in culture, art and society is covered. The Companion Encyclopedia features annotated bibliographies of both classic and contemporary sources; black and white illustrations, line figures and equations; biographies of major mathematicians and historians and philosophers of mathematics; a chronological table of main events in the developments of mathematics; and a fully integrated index of people, events and topics. (shrink)

Philosophy of science and history of science both have a significant relation to science itself; but what is their relation to each other? That question has been a focal point of philosophical and historical work throughout the second half of this century. An analysis and review of the progress made in dealing with this question, and especially that made in philosophy, is the focus of this thesis. Chapter one concerns logical positivist and empiricist approaches (...) to philosophy of science, and the significance of the criticisms levelled at them by analytic epistemologists such as Willard Quine and 'historicist' philosophers, especially Thomas Kuhn. Chapter two details the attempts by Kuhn and Lakatos to integrate these historicist criticisms with historically oriented philosophy of science, in their separate attempts at providing rational explanations of historical developments. Kuhn's latest work seeks to mend fences with philosophy, but his efforts remain too closely tied to the epistemological approaches strongly criticized in his earlier work. Lakatos' treatment of history is much more subtle than most have understood it to be, but the conception of scientific rationality that arises out of it is transformed into an abstract cultural product, more reminiscent of Hegel's geist than of individual human rationality. Chapters three and four discuss the recommendations of Lakatos and Laudan to historians with regard to historiography, and the actual historiographies and philosophy of history of practicing historians and historians of science. The philosophers' contributions indicate little concern for the historians' own methods, materials, and purposes; and the historians' writings present methodologies for history of science that are independent of the normative demarcations of philosophy of science, pace Lakatos and Laudan. Chapter five develops a philosophical position that fosters a more productive engagement between philosophy and history of science, a 'methodological historicism' that embraces the possibility of an important role for social and political factors in a philosophical study of scientific development. The epistemological relativism that might accompany such a historicist position need not be the radical epistemological anarchism of Feyerabend, though it will allow for a significant underdetermination of scientific development by reason nonetheless. (shrink)

Teaching is an important aspect of scientific practice. However, it has only recently become the subject of detailed historical and philosophical analyses. In this paper, I argue that Joseph Rouse’s philosophy of scientific practice has important implications for the study of scientific education. Rouse’s dynamic conception of scientific knowledge entails that education should occupy a central place in our analyses of scientific practices, as it is crucial in guaranteeing their temporal extension and sustenance. However, Rouse’s reconceptualization of scientific knowledge (...) also has implications for our understanding of scientific education itself. I will work out these implications, focussing on Rouse’s non-subject-centered account of scientific practices. More generally, I show how Rouse’s philosophy of science entails that the study of scientific education should take the form of an integrated history and philosophy of scientific education. (shrink)

This paper addresses the context of emergence, development, and current status of the use of history and philosophy of science in science education in Brazil. After a short overview of the three areas (history of science, philosophy of science, and science education) in Brazil, the paper focuses on the application of this approach to teaching physics, chemistry, and biology at the secondary school level. The first Brazilian researches along this line appeared (...) more consistently in the decade of 1970. From 1980 onwards, the importance of this approach became widely accepted, and the subject became a common theme of dissertations and theses, appearing in conferences and educational journals. Since 1998, the use of history and philosophy of science was included among the government recommendations for secondary school science teaching in Brazil. Nowadays, this is an important line of research in graduate programs on science and mathematics education. However, the actual use of this approach in secondary education is still a desideratum. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the value of philosophy of science for history of science. I start by introducing a distinction between two ways of integrating history and philosophy of science: historical philosophy of science and philosophical history of science. I then offer a critical discussion of Imre Lakatos’s project to bring philosophy of science to bear on historical interpretation. I point out certain flaws in Lakatos’s project, (...) which I consider indicative of what went wrong with PHS in the past. Finally, I put forward my own attempt to bring out the historiographical potential of philosophy of science. Starting from Norwood Russell Hanson’s insight that historical studies of science involve metascientific concepts, I argue that philosophical reflection on those concepts can be historiographically fruitful. I focus on four issues and discuss their significance and utility for historiographical practice. (shrink)

The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader brings together seminal texts from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time. With readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell, it analyses and discusses major classical, medieval and modern texts and figures from the natural sciences. Grouped by topic to clarify the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of (...) theories, each section includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading and end-of-section discussion questions, allowing students to develop the skills needed to: § read, interpret, and critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history and philosophy of science § understand and evaluate scientific material found in a wide variety of professional and popular settings § appreciate the social and cultural context in which scientific ideas emerge § identify the roles that mathematics plays in scientific inquiry Featuring primary sources in all the core scientific fields - astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences - The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader is ideal for students looking to better understand the origins of natural science and the questions asked throughout its history. By taking a thematic approach to introduce influential assumptions, methods and answers, this reader illustrates the implications of an impressive range of values and ideas across the history and philosophy of Western science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science from Thomas Kuhn to the present. This relationship, of course, has often been troubled, but there is now new hope for an ongoing productive interaction—due to an increasing awareness, among other things, of the mutual entanglement between the development of modern science and the development of modern philosophy on the part of both professional (historically minded) philosophers and professional historians of (...) science. This idea is illustrated with several examples, including the entanglement of Einstein's theory of relativity with logical empiricism and its precursors and the entanglement of the analytic tradition in philosophy first with mathematical logic and then (through mathematical logic) with the cognitive sciences. Against this background, finally, the essay considers the emergence of contemporary social and cultural history of science from the Kantian and neo‐Kantian philosophical traditions. (shrink)

This article describes the effect of a teaching–learning sequence based on the discovery of oxygen in promoting students’ argumentation. It examines the written and oral arguments produced by 63 high school students in France during a complete TLS supervised by the same teacher. The data used in this analysis was derived from students’ written responses, audio and video recordings, and written field notes. The first goal of this investigation was to provide evidence that an approach combining history and (...) class='Hi'>philosophy of science and argumentation could increase students’ awareness of the relevance of experimentation and communication to scientific progress. The second goal was to assess the effectiveness of the TLS to engage students in argumentative classroom interactions relating to the discovery of oxygen at the end of the 18th century. The findings show that this historical case can be useful for promoting students’ argumentation and is also appropriate for high school students. Future research should include students of other ages, other historical episodes and experiences in other parts of the world. (shrink)

This chapter relates a broadly chronological story of the developments over the last 50 years that have sought to reshape the science curriculum in English schools by introducing aspects of the history of science and nature of science. The chapter highlights key curriculum projects by outlining the contexts in which they developed and summarising their rationales as set out in their publications. It also provides signposts to some of the reports of research and scholarship that have (...) evaluated these initiatives. The chapter shows how the first national curriculum in 1989 was influenced by earlier initiatives as it made teaching about the nature of science mandatory for all. This requirement faded into the background after a few years and then re-emerged with a new rationale as ‘how science works’ in 2004. The chapter ends by looking to the future with a discussion of a new course which contrasts with earlier traditions by focussing the teaching and learning on the history and philosophy of science rather than using ideas from these disciplines to teach about science. (shrink)

Social science, history, and philosophy have often been neglect in thinking through their fundamentally intertwined relationship. The result is often an inattention to philosophy where social science and history is concerned, or a neglect of historicity and social analysis where philosophy is concerned. Meanwhile, the place of values in research is often uneasily passed over in silence. The inattention to, and loss of, the intersection between these different disciplines and their subject matters, leaves (...) our investigations all the more impoverished as a result. In resolving these problems, it is not enough to strive for cooperation or integration, but to rethink of the nature of the disciplines themselves; their interests, purposes, and presuppositions. In this volume, contributors explore different facets of these relationships, and move beyond the problematics erected by positivism often cast in terms of value-free or value-neutral science, that is, a science obsessed with empirical data, schematic classifications, and the pursuit of law-like forms. While positivism has been subject to critique, the influence and legacy of positivism remains. It remains in the way in which we often think about science; the line drawn between the sciences and the humanities; the norms researchers should follow; what a successful explanation looks like; and the ethical, normative, and political implications of scientific research. Aimed at students and researchers of philosophy, history and the social sciences, this book is driven by a desire to revindicate questions concerning ontology and social ontology, to rethink the nature of explanation, and to resituate normativity and values within scientific, social scientific, and historical pursuits. (shrink)

The very idea of a general philosophy of science relies on the assumption that there is this thing called science —as opposed to the various individual sciences. In this programmatic piece I make a case for the claim that general philosophy of science is the philosophy of science in general or science as such. Part of my narrative makes use of history, for two reasons. First, general philosophy of science (...) is itself characterised by an intellectual tradition which aimed to develop a coherent philosophical view of science, qua a part of culture with distinctive epistemic features and a distinctive relation to reality. But, second, this tradition went through some important conceptual shifts which re-oriented it and made it more sensitive to the actual development of science itself. The historical narrative focuses on three such moments: the defining moment, associated with Aristotle, and two major conceptual turns, related to Kant and Duhem. The pressures on the very idea of a general philosophy of science that followed the collapse of the macro-models of science that became popular in the 1960s, the pressures that lay all of the emphasis on fragmentation and not on integration, can be dealt with by a new synthesis within general philosophy of science of the constitutive and the historical, in light of the intellectual tradition that has defined it. (shrink)

Since 2004, it has been mandated by law that all Danish undergraduate university programmes have to include a compulsory course on the philosophy of science for that particular program. At the Faculty of Science and Technology, Aarhus University, the responsibility for designing and running such courses were given to the Centre for Science Studies, where a series of courses were developed aiming at the various bachelor educations of the Faculty. Since 2005, the Centre has been running (...) a dozen different courses ranging from mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry over medical chemistry, biology, molecular biology to sports science, geology, molecular medicine, nano science, and engineering. -/- We have adopted a teaching philosophy of using historical and contemporary case studies to anchor broader philosophical discussions in the particular subject discipline under consideration. Thus, the courses are tailored to the interests of the students of the particular programme whilst aiming for broader and important philosophical themes as well as addressing the specific mandated requirements to integrate philosophy, some introductory ethics, and some institutional history. These are multiple and diverse purposes which cannot be met except by compromise. -/- In this short presentation, we discuss our ambitions for using case studies to discuss philosophical issues and the relation between the specific philosophical discussions in the disciplines and the broader themes of philosophy of science. We give examples of the cases chosen to discuss various issues of scientific knowledge, the role of experiments, the relations between mathematics and science, and the issues of responsibility and trust in scientific results. Finally, we address the issue of how and why science students can be interested in and benefit from mandatory courses in the philosophy of their subject. (shrink)

Kuhn closed the Introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with what was clearly intended as a rhetorical question: How could history of science fail to be a source of phenomena to which theories about knowledge may legitimately be asked to apply? (Kuhn 1970, 9) This paper argues that there is a more fruitful way of conceiving the relationship between a historical and philosophical study of science, which is dubbed the 'phylogenetic' approach. I sketch an example of (...) this approach, and take a first pass at an abstract characterization of the method. (shrink)

The book examines the emerging approach of using qualitative methods, such as interviews and field observations, in the philosophy of science. Qualitative methods are gaining popularity among philosophers of science as more and more scholars are resorting to empirical work in their study of scientific practices. At the same time, the results produced through empirical work are quite different from those gained through the kind of introspective conceptual analysis more typical of philosophy. This volume explores the (...) benefits and challenges of an empirical philosophy of science and addresses questions such as: What do philosophers gain from empirical work? How can empirical research help to develop philosophical concepts? How do we integrate philosophical frameworks and empirical research? What constraints do we accept when choosing an empirical approach? What constraints does a pronounced theoretical focus impose on empirical work? Nine experts discuss their thoughts and empirical results in the chapters of this book with the aim of providing readers with an answer to these questions. (shrink)

In this paper we return to Ronald Giere and his claim that history of science as a discipline cannot contribute to philosophy of science by providing, partial or whole, solutions to philosophical problems. Let us suppose that Giere was right. Would the implication be that there can be no genuine interdisciplinarity between the two disciplines? In answering this question it is first suggested that connections between disciplines can be formed around the transfer and sharing of problems (...) ; and that this is a viable alternative of how to understand the relationship between history and philosophy of science. Next we argue that this is sufficient for establishing a genuine form of interdisciplinarity between them. An example is presented—Lindley Darden’s book on theory change—that shows how philosophy of science can rely on history of science in this way. (shrink)

The project of integrated HPS has occupied philosophers of science in one form or another since at least the 1960s. Yet, despite this substantial interest in bringing together philosophical and historical reflections on the nature of science, history of science and formal philosophy of science remain as divided as ever. In this paper, I will argue that the continuing separation between historical and formal philosophy of science is ill-founded. I will argue (...) for this in both abstract and concrete terms. At the abstract level, I reconstruct two possible arguments for the incompatibility of historical and formal philosophy of science and argue that they are both wanting. At the concrete level, I discuss how historical and formal philosophy of science have been brought together in practice, namely: in the form of a largely forgotten research tradition that I will refer to here as the study of formalized macro-units. After a brief exposition, I argue that this research tradition has been unduly overlooked by historically minded philosophers of science. Bringing together these observations, I argue that the divide between historical and formal philosophy of science is not grounded in any substantive arguments, but can be primarily attributed to disciplinary happenstance. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of original essays focusing on a wide range of topics in the History and Philosophy of Science. It is a festschrift for Peter Machamer, which includes contributions from scholars who, at one time or another, were his students. The essays bring together analyses of issues and debates spanning from early modern science and philosophy through the 21st century. Machamer’s influence is reflected in the volume’s broad range of topics. These include: (...) underdetermination, scientific practice, scientific models, mechanistic explanation in contemporary and historical science, values in science, the relationship between philosophy and psychology, experimentation, supervenience and reductionism. (shrink)