Imperialism, Progress, Developmental Teleology, and Interdisciplinary Unification

Abstract

In a previous article in this journal, we examined John Dupré's claim that ‘scientific imperialism’ can lead to ‘misguided’ science being considered acceptable. Here, we address criticisms raised by Ian J. Kidd and Uskali Mäki against that article. While both commentators take us to be offering our own account of scientific imperialism that goes beyond that developed by Dupré, and go on to criticise what they take to be our account, our actual ambitions were modest. We intended to ‘explicate the sense in which the term is used by Dupré’ and to ‘identify the normative content of his critique of scientific imperialism’. We made no claim to have developed our own account of scientific imperialism that went further than what was implicit in Dupré's work already. However, that said, the discussions presented by both Kidd and Mäki raise important general issues about how the idea of scientific imperialism should be understood and framed. Here, we offer our considered responses to Kidd's and Maki's discussions of scientific imperialism.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Uskali Mäki and to an audience at a seminar at the Finnish Centre for Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences in Helsinki for helpful discussion of an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

[1] This line of criticism does not appear in the final version of Kidd (2013), but was present in a penultimate version, which we were working with.

[2] This claim stands in need of some qualification. If there are vastly many available theories and if the process of testing these is onerous then we will be more likely to locate the most truth-apt theory more swiftly if we are able to dismiss some of the available theories without testing them properly.

[3] Niiniluoto (2011) characterises these two different treatments of progress in science as involving ‘forward looking’ and ‘backward looking’ criteria.

[4] Maki continues: ‘One might as well expect it to have been the other way around—first disapproval due to some substantive reasons for perceived failure in interdisciplinary trespassing, then the label to convey the disapproval and perhaps to explain the failure.’ (Mäki 2013, 329).

[5] According to Tallis (2013), the philosopher of science, James Ladyman, considers the pejorative term ‘scientistic’ to be a ‘badge of honour’.