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Multiple Constraints, Simultaneous Solutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Peter Galison
Peter Galison*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

Historians and philosophers of science have, of late, found a new common ground. During the 1960s the two fields worked together to answer the general question: “how does one theory supersede another?” — followed immediately by a second query: “Is the process rational?” Historians provided examples from the chronicles of science, and philosophers tested these cases against universal models of change. Together the two helped ground an important avenue of inquiry, and today the best of that work — by Feyerabend, Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper, and others — forms a staple of the philosophy of science.

But despite the best of intentions, in the 1970s the two fields began to pull apart centrifugally. On one side, the philosophers found their concerns concentrated ever more on fundamental issues about meaning and reference, and these seemed to demand idealized histories with simpler structures.

Type
Part V. Experiment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 157 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I have benefitted greatly from conversations with N. Cartwright, A. Davidson, C.A. Jones, T. Lenoir, M. Morrison, and N. Wise.

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