Studying Justificatory Practice: An Attempt to Integrate the History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented in the HPS reading group at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, in spring 2007 and at the conference &HPS1, University of Pittsburgh, October 2007. I thank the audiences as well as Theodore Arabatzis, Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Richard Burian, Jordi Cat, Uljana Feest, Jan Frercks, Stephen Friesen, John Johnson, and the anonymous referee of this journal for critique and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of the article. I am particularly thankful to Hasok Chang, Melinda Fagan, and David M. Miller for their astute and insightful comments on the penultimate draft. Portions of the paper were written while I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Generous support from the Mellon Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

[1] For older contributions to the debate about HPS, see, e.g., Feigl (1970), McMullin (1970), Giere (1973), Musgrave (1974), Shapere (1977), McMullin (1976), Burian (1977), and Krüger (1979).

[2] The 1992 symposium was entitled Do the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science Have Anything to Say to Each Other? The topic of the 1994 symposium was Discourse, Practice, Context: From HPS to Interdisciplinary Science Studies.

[3] It seems to me that the opposite, philosophically informed history of science, has been less of a concern: some historians endorse it, others do not, but it has rarely been a bone of contention. Contributions to the discussion about historically informed philosophy of science usually identify early‐20th‐century logical empiricism as the culprit spoiling the relation between the history and philosophy of science, and the ‘anti‐positivist’ era in the 1970s and 1980s as the period when the history and philosophy of science again became closer allies (Nickles 1995). The flourishing of sociology and cultural studies of science is sometimes seen as a welcome addition to HPS (Smocovitis 1996; Wylie 1996) but also as a threat to the precarious coalition between the history and philosophy of science formed in the 1970s (Laudan 1992). Moreover, some authors, notably Brian Baigrie, remind us that there are different kinds of HPS with different pedigrees: ‘Classical HPS’ pursued by Kuhn, Lakatos, and co., and ‘New HPS’ in the wake of Bachelard and Foucault (Baigrie 1996, 421).

[4] One additional important reason for an increased interest in the relation between the history and philosophy of science is institutional. In the era of budget cuts and economy measures, academic departments especially in the humanities are forced to justify their academic existence and to make their students fit for an ever‐more competitive job marked. This affects the relation between the two fields.

[5] This is of course how the collaboration between the history and philosophy of science was conceived in the 1970s; see the references in note 1.

[6] Recall that in his 1938 monograph, Experience and Prediction, Hans Reichenbach motivated the separation of the ‘context of discovery’ and the ‘context of justification’ by highlighting the ‘well‐known’ difference between scientists’ actual thinking processes (the ‘context of discovery’) and the presentation of a theory before a public (the ‘context of justification’). According to Reichenbach, in the course of their communication, scientific results are reformulated in such a way that logical analysis can be performed on them (Reichenbach 1938, 6). Reichenbach regarded this reformulation as ‘rational reconstruction’ of research results that scientists undertake with an eye to validation. In the 1960s, Peter Medawar famously stated that the scientific paper was a ‘fraud’ precisely because it did not reflect the scientists’ actual reasoning processes (Medawar 1996 [1963]). I analyse the changing interpretations of the mismatch between what scientists are doing and what they say they have done in Schickore (2008).

[7] The only suggestion in this direction comes from Robert Richards, but it remains sketchy. Richards contends that the gap between history (the study of the concrete and particular) and philosophy (the construction of general accounts) would disappear if both projects were conducted in the right manner. Philosophers should ‘be trained in history of science, after the manner of historians’, while historians ‘must train in the argument styles and become apprised of the literature in philosophy’ (Richards 1992, 487, 488). Both parties could then join forces in the common endeavour to study theories as historical entities as well as the explanations, observations, and justifications that go with those theories.

[8] This is, to an extent, an arbitrary choice of materials that I happen to know well. I am drawing on a previous study of the methodology of microscopy around 1800 (Schickore 2007).

[9] To capture these insights, some philosophers have proposed a more sophisticated set of conceptual tools that acknowledges a middle phase of ‘pursuit’ or ‘prior assessment’ in which the initial idea is developed and secured (e.g., Darden 1998). It is therefore no longer obvious that the final scientific paper is the relevant site of justification. Sociologists of science have even suggested that the principal site of scientific reasoning and justification is the laboratory or the field rather than the publication (Knorr‐Cetina 1981, 8, 9). The scientific publication, they argue, is a tool of persuasion aimed at a wider audience (Latour 1987, 45). Shifting the focus from the scientific paper to the actual research activities creates major challenges for the analyst. How can one access the day‐to‐day activities of the researchers, let alone extract justificatory practices from them? I agree with recent critics of the context distinction that justification is ubiquitous and not confined to a particular ‘context’ following the phase of knowledge generation. In fact, there may even be various different aims and audiences for justificatory arguments, ranging from the justification of a particular research step to one’s lab director, to the justification of a research proposal to a funding agency. But this is going beyond the scope of the present article.

[10] One may of course also study the dynamics of the development of the justificatory procedures. In this case, the transformations from one paper to another would be the focus of the analysis.

[11] I am using Ian Hacking’s apt label (Hacking 2002).

[12] The ‘+’ stands for a condition to de‐Gettierize the analysis.

[13] He develops the set in Franklin (1986, ch. 6), and subsequently it has appeared with minor variations in many publications, including Franklin and Howson (1988), Franklin (1989, 1990), and Franklin and Howson (1998). I use the 1989 version here because I find that presentation of the strategies the most concise.

[14] Franklin claims that the rationality of these strategies can be independently demonstrated. He does not elaborate on this in the article in question, but he does provide an argument in another context where he shows that the strategies can be embedded in a Bayesian approach to science.

[15] Of course, the results of my analysis of Müller’s texts are tainted by my previous work on microscopy, which also emphasises the epistemic functions of discourses about chemical methods for 19th‐century microscopy.

[16] Answering this question requires additional conceptual resources and further appeal to the historical record, but it does not differ in kind from the analyses presented so far.

[17] Hasok Chang’s notion of justification as epistemic iteration is similar to Nickles’s characterisation. In his book, Inventing Temperature, Chang examines how scientists established temperature scales. In view of this study, he argues that foundationalist theories of justification in science are bound to fail, and that justification is necessarily circular. He agrees with coherentists that justifications for claims to knowledge can be found ‘in the coherence of elements that lack ultimate justification in themselves’ (Chang 2004, 221). But he offers a new diagnosis of this situation, stressing that this circularity is progressive because an aspect of self‐correction is built into justificatory procedures. Justification begins with preliminary criteria, which are being refined as new knowledge is generated. Chang calls this process ‘epistemic iteration’. Chang’s approach is meant to capture the dynamics of scientific justification; justificatory criteria are being refined as new knowledge is being generated.

[18] John Rawls (1971) coined the term ‘reflective equilibrium’ in the context of his theory of moral judgements, drawing on Nelson Goodman.

[19] The notion ‘complementary epistemology’ is inspired by Hasok Chang’s concept of ‘complementary science’. In ‘complementary science’, the history and philosophy of science ‘work together in identifying and answering questions about the world that are excluded from current specialist science’ (Chang 2004, 240). Chang expresses the hope that history and philosophy may recover forgotten knowledge and raise awareness of the imperfections of existing knowledge, thereby stimulating the development of new knowledge.

[20] This is one of the insights that already inspired the 1994 PSA symposium.

[21] Larry Holmes (1987) emphasised that the writing of consecutive versions of a paper is an integral part of the process of scientific knowledge production.