Philosophy of Science and Science Studies in the West: An Unrecognized Convergence

Abstract

During the 1990s the dominant research programs from the 1970s and 1980s in both philosophy of science and interdisciplinary science studies seemed to reach dead ends. During the same period, new and interestingly convergent research programs emerged in both philosophy of science and science studies, but their mutual relevance was not widely recognized. In earlier work, I called attention to important developments in anthropology, history, and feminist scholarship as “cultural studies of science” that rejected epistemological assumptions widely shared among both philosophers and sociologists of scientific knowledge. Here I highlight four subsequent developments in philosophy that constructively engage this new work in science studies: (1) a resurrection of interest in causality, (2) work on theoretical models and their relations to model laboratory systems, (3) finer-grained accounts of conceptual articulation in the sciences, and (4) broader philosophical work on the relation between conceptual understanding and perceptual and practical skill.

• Philosophy of science
• Science studies
• Causality
• Experiment
• Models
• Conceptual understanding

Notes

1 Examples include a Mellon Conference titled “What Is Science Studies?” at the University of Chicago in 2005 and a meeting of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science in 2007 titled “After the Science Wars: Whither Science Studies?” The former meeting invited mostly sociologists, historians, and anthropologists of science; the latter primarily included philosophers and sociologists of science.

2 Zammito's title, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, may seem strange and indecipherable. The title involves a double play on the title of a famous article in the philosophy of language by Donald Davidson (1986), “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” Davidson's article addressed the question of how listeners can understand what speakers mean even if their words make no literal sense. His title was taken from a line in Richard Sheridan's eighteenth-century play The Rivals, whose character Mrs. Malaprop frequently used the wrong word or ungrammatical constructions and yet was nevertheless understood by her listeners, to humorous effect. Such understandable errors are thus now known as “malaprops,” after this character. When Mrs. Malaprop said, “That's a nice derangement of epitaphs,” what she actually meant was “That's a nice arrangement of epithets.” Zammito then substituted Foucault's term “episteme,” which denotes successive periods in the history of science and knowledge in which different governing assumptions changed how knowledge was formulated and assessed. Thus, his title was intended to suggest that philosophy and sociology of science since Quine and Kuhn have presented crazy or “deranged” accounts of scientific knowledge, accounts whose derangement resulted from their excessive epistemological holism and historicism.

3 This essay was reprinted as the final chapter of Rouse 1996, which is soon to appear in Chinese translation from Suzhou University Press.

4 Wilson uses the analogy of an atlas, in which one maps the world not in a single, all-encompassing map, but in successive pages or “facades” that instead provide a series of partially overlapping maps and that may also have gaps.

5 I argue that explanation was indeed the central issue for logical empiricist philosophy of science partly because the substitution of explanation by logical deduction from laws for causal understanding was exemplary of logical empiricism's hostility to “metaphysics.” It is also instructive, however, that the recognized absence of any remotely adequate theory of empirical confirmation long predated the effective demise of logical empiricism. Logical empiricism instead collapsed when historicist accounts of theoretical understanding replaced the deductive-nomological theory of explanation.