What’s in It for the Historian of Science? Reflections on the Value of Philosophy of Science for History of Science

ABSTRACT

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 (HPS) and philosophical history of science (PHS). 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 (and, indeed, has been) historiographically fruitful. I focus on four issues (epistemic values, experimentation, scientific discovery and conceptual change) and discuss their significance and utility for historiographical practice.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the panel of judges for the 2017 IUHPST Essay Prize in History and Philosophy of Science (Hasok Chang, Rachel Ankeny, Jean Gayon, Alan Love, Lydia Patton, and Friedrich Steinle) for honouring me with this award. Furthermore, I would like to thank James McAllister for the invitation to publish my essay in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Last but not least, I am indebted to my historian and philosopher colleagues in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens for providing a congenial and stimulating intellectual environment, where the ideas in this paper have been developed. I am particularly thankful to Chris Mantzavinos for very helpful discussions about my larger project on philosophical history of science, out of which this essay has emerged.

Notes

1 The confusion between historical explanation and post-hoc rational justification permeates Lakatos’s ‘History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions’. See Lakatos (1976), 13, 14, 15, 17, 26, 33. Cf. Arabatzis (1994).

2 Lakatos (1976, 28) used these words to castigate the rational reconstructions of other ‘historiographical research programmes’, such as inductivism, conventionalism and falsificationism. They apply equally well, however, to his own rational reconstructions.

3 See Lorentz’s 1906 letter to Poincaré, quoted and discussed in Miller (1985), 85.

4 This is how Olivier Darrigol presents Einstein’s reaction to Kaufmann’s results in a dialogue between Einstein and other early-twentieth-century physicists that is fictitious, but grounded in historical sources. See Darrigol (2000), 386; also Topper (2007), 8.