Department of Epistemology &
Philosophy of Science
University of Łódź
Kopcińskiego 16/18, 90-242
Łódź, Poland
e-mail: barbtu@filozof.uni.lodz.pl
Clio meets Minerva:
Interrelations
between History
and
Philosophy of Science[1]
The idea that science is historical
is almost a cliché nowadays. The historical dimensions of science have begun to
be appreciated by philosophers of science, for some through the work of Kuhn,
and for others through Popper and Lakatos. Does this mean that contemporary
philosophy of science understands
the historical nature of science? Let me begin with a provocative negative
answer. My reason is not the obvious one, namely, that there are several
competing models that address the historical development of science. Rather,
it's more substantial: philosophers of
science have not adequately reflected on the historical nature
of science.
There
are still at least two barriers blocking a meaningful dialogue between the
history of science and the philosophy of science: (1) the normative and
evaluative orientation of philosophy of science and (2) its universalist stance
toward science, a stance somewhat modified in current literature. No wonder
Minerva cannot communicate with Clio; not only do they not speak the same
language, but their perspectives and aims differ too. Does this mean that
Minerva can't be replaced with Calliope, that philosophy of science will go on
"its own way, paying little attention to the naturalist stories told by historians
and sociologists, and, in turn, being widely ignored by them?". [2]
Does this mean that their only possible relation is lack of relation--their
"splendid isolation"--entailing abstention from alliances, even from
a "marriage of convenience," or, for that matter, from any other sort
of interaction? Does this mean that philosophy of science uses historical
episodes simply to find its problems, or appeals to those episodes only to
illustrate its claims or to falsify the claims of opposing philosophical views?
Well, not necessarily. Interactions and cooperation between the two are
possible, but depend, first, on their (in particular, philosophy's)
self-definitions, and, second, on how they both relate to philosophy, and, in
particular, to the philosophy of history.
1. Philosophy of science and history
of science
For
those philosophers of science who maintain the epistemological or
methodological ideal of normative philosophy of science there's either no need
to interact with history of science or the need is limited. For them,
philosophy of science is prescriptive and restricted to the context of
justification, whereas history is descriptive and concerned with the context of
discovery; even when philosophy does describe, it offers reconstructions and searches
(ideally) for nomological explanations of reconstructed historical events,
whereas history is idiographic and aims at the particular. Philosophy uses
historical events as grist for its model making, whereas history aims at
contextualized understanding of what scientists did, what they believed, which
procedures they applied, which positions they accepted, which traditions they
worked within. [3] Particular
positions within the normative philosophy of science may be, however, more or
less anti-historical.
If
philosophy of science is viewed in a justificationist mood--as formulating
objective norms of scientific rationality, and standards for evaluating
scientific results (theories, explanations, laws) as scientific or progressive
(more similar to truth, better confirmed, more adequate etc.), its stance is
ahistorical and dogmatic and it has to seek a priori or transcendental
justifications for its norms and not simply appeal to relevant empirical
support. [4]
For a justificationist philosophy of science references to the history of
science are useless. Worse yet, any attempt to test norms that can actually and
normatively demarcate science from pseudo-science by appeal to historical
(empirical) cases is hopelessly circular. [5]
On
the other hand, rational reconstructionism (as found, for example, in the
conceptions of Popper or Lakatos), whose broad aim is to replace
justificationism, regards the history of science as "useful to know" [6]
because it can falsify philosophies of science [7].
However, it's doubtful whether the Popperian and Lakatosian models of the
development of science are concerned with the same objective as the history of
science, since their objective is the growth of disembodied, objective
knowledge, whereas history of science's concern is to study the beliefs of
historical scientists and events as they happen in empirical, sociocultural
reality.
Finally,
for philosophers who believe that philosophy of science should remain
normative, though in a more plausible way, that is, without "fabricating
examples," [8] a need is
seen for articulating its interaction with the history of science, and there's
a recognition of legitimate uses that historical facts play. For instance, Kuhn
claims that the aim of philosophers who adopt an historical perspective is the
same as historians of science: namely, "understanding small incremental changes of belief." [9]Philosophical
understanding of scientific change, for Kuhn, has two specific features lacking
in purely historical narratives: it contains a priori principles which refer to
the nature of scientific development (indeed to all developmental processes)
and it includes evaluation, though not evaluation of beliefs that refers to
their truth. Instead, it's comparative evaluation of changes of belief in terms of accuracy, consistency, the range of
applications and simplicity. [10]
Kitcher, another advocate of this position, believes reference to historical
cases is necessary to avoid considering mythical science and to evade a
conclusion perhaps unavoidable for an ahistorical view, namely, that
"virtually all scientists virtually all of the time depart from sound
practice." [11] The most
radical exponent of a naturalist, yet still normative perspective, is Laudan.
He sees no need for appeal to non-empirical principles or to purely epistemic
reasoning in order to underwrite objective standards of rationality. Means to
preferred ends should be established empirically, and cognitive goals should be
settled in accordance with values implicit in communal scientific practice. [12]
Normativity
is not, however, constitutive for philosophy of science. Several contemporary
philosophers of science, for example, Feyerabend, Quine, Giere, or Hacking,
have abandoned normative questions regarding scientific research and its
rationality. They don't believe there's an objective, non-contextualized, and
trans-historical justification for the aims, rules, or standards of science. [13]
On the contrary: they accept the idea that standards of scientific pursuit are
constituted by the historical and communal activity of scientists, beyond which
those standards require no further explanation or justification. Accordingly,
for them, the relation between history of science and philosophy of science is,
and should be, a close and permanent interaction between two equally
descriptive disciplines even though one gives narrative stories and the other
generalized description and explanation.
At
this point we arrive at the second barrier that blocks interaction between the
philosophy and history of science, namely, the universalist stance of
philosophy of science. This issue has been less discussed, and it seems it's
not considered to be a serious obstacle on the path toward connecting the
history and philosophy of science.
Margolis
is one of few writers who addresses it. [14]
The main target of his criticism is the canonical view of history (as presented
by Hempel, Popper, or Putnam). [15]
According to this view, the historical can and should be described in
nonhistorical terms. [16]
The development of science is an instantiation of an historical process that
happens alike in the natural and the social realms; moreover, an historical
process is merely a succession of occurrences connected by contiguity,
resemblance, and causation. Furthermore, the sole matrix within which
historical events occur is physical time and space. Historical time is either
indistinguishable from physical time or else it's completely determined by it. [17]
Only if temporal events are subsumed under (a combination of) laws, can they be
described, explained, predicted, and--it is hoped--be manipulated. Seen in this
light, the temporal localization and idiosyncrasies of historical events are
insignificant, and what matters is the search for invariances, for repeatable
patterns, stable dependencies, and permanent determinants. [18]
In short, there are two assumptions constitutive of the canonical view: (1)
history is a passage of events in the objective flow of physical time, and (2)
historical episodes are nothing more than independent atoms making up history.
The
question to be considered now is whether this objective approach is acceptable
as a perspective that allows us to understand the historical nature of science
and to write a history as "a history of the present science". My
second provocative answer is again negative. And there are two reasons for it.
First, any universalizing description is
an attempt to deprive historical events or objects of their unique localization
within history, of their singularity; that is, it suppresses their
historical character by "subsuming temporal particularity into atemporal
generality." [19]
Second, contrary to the objectivist stance taken by the canonical approach, the historical does not speak for itself.
To develop these arguments I turn to the philosophy of history.
2. Philosophy of history as a basis
for history and philosophy of science
As
Wartofsky notes, it's not only rational reconstructionism that has no use for
"philosophical history of science, that is, history of science construed
from the point of view of a philosophy of history." [20]
In fact none of the historically based philosophies of science sees need to
refer to the philosophy of history. As a result, they don't try to problematize
the historical nature of science; in short, they fail to deal with its historicity. To problematize the
historical nature of science means--in particular--to conceive the difference
within a process or an episode between its having a dynamical as opposed to an
historical character. The former can be conceptualized in terms of sheer
temporal sequences and causal dependencies, the latter cannot.
There's
no commonly accepted philosophy of history. Philosophical reflection on history
is predominantly anti-objectivist. At least since the nineteenth century many
thinkers have presupposed that "history is concerned with unrepeatable,
singular past events not subsumable under universal laws", that it
concentrates on "the contingent rather than necessary doings of
specifiable human agents" and that "there is a gap between the event,
and any invariant or constructed model." [21]
Philosophical reflection on history stretches from essentialist approaches,
through historicism, to ontological-hermeneutic positions, and typically it
doesn't look for nomological description and explanation of singular historical
episodes, but seeks understanding of history in the light of historical
processes in their entirety or in terms of human experience.
The
essentialist approach is represented by St. Augustine's City of God, in which time and history march forward to their
inevitable fulfillment in the city of God, or by the unfolding of the Spirit in
Hegel's phenomenology. What's crucial to any essentialist approach is
interpreting historical events in terms of an unfolding essence taken to
exhibit their ultimate aims or invariances. If applied to the history of
science, such categories become the foundation "by means of which the
history of science is organized, and through which it can come to be understood
in its development". [22]
For essentialism, history is "the extrinsic chronicle of local changes
relativized (in principle) to some (supposedly) changeless order of
things." [23] Wartofsky
claims correctly that the histories of science of Mach, Meyerson, Duhem, and
Whewell fit to a greater or lesser degree the essentialist stance. To this list
one can add the works of Gillispie, Dijksterhuis, and Crombie, among others.
Their works illustrate Big Picture historiography of scientific development:
each conception has a unifying narrative structure which allows history to be
totalized, thus endowing it with epochal spatio-temporal scope and evaluative
significance. Even the titles of their works presume to capture the essence of
science revealed (or--rather--presupposed) by historical analysis. They
privilege ideas understood as autonomous uncaused causes, posit discrete
agencies with histories independent of their instantiations, and articulate a
logic of history separable from any grounding in institutions, practices, and
social relations. They typically emphasize continuity in scientific development
and the historical advance of our understanding of nature.
German
historicism, established by Mainecke, Droysen and Dilthey, rejects providential
and teleological view of human history, opposes naturalist approach to history
and the ahistorical rationalism of Enlightenment. [24]
It presupposes a qualitative distinction between the natural and the
historical, i.e., between the sphere of determined events, studied by the
natural sciences, and the sphere of conscious and free action composed of
cultural events, constituted by meanings and values, and studied by the
humanities. The second sphere is the realm of history (culture); its elements
are individual, unique historical phenomena, relativized to their particular
contexts and requiring understanding rather than subsumption under general
laws. Knowledge (consciousness) of historical phenomena is itself historical,
and is aware of the relative nature of all consciousness. Hence, historicism brings
historians into history but gives them enough independence from historical
constraints to believe that they can "relive the past", that they are
able imaginatively and interpretatively to re-create in their minds historical
events or experiences of past subjects.
As
Shapin argues, in the contemporary history of science there's a program that
follows historicism, a program "dedicated to analyzing historical action
in historical actors' terms." [25]
This program is threatened by an "atomizing particularism" that can
only be disciplined by the sociologist's collectivism that allows historians to
view actors' categories as social institutions. [26]
The turn toward sociology of science wouldn't, however, remedy another
difficulty of historicism: the more perfect our understanding becomes of
historical actors in their terms the more difficult it is "to communicate
our understanding to our own academic colleagues and to constituencies outside
the academy." [27]
If
the opposition between historicism and essentialist historiosophy is clear, the
difference between historicism and the ontological-hermeneutic approach of
Heidegger, Gadamer or Ricoeur is not self-evident. Both are hermeneutic and
reject all forms of essentialism. The ontological-hermeneutic view of history goes
beyond the opposition of the natural and the cultural explicit in historicism,
aiming to extend the meaning of hermeneutical understanding. Its primordial aim
is not to project historical research "methodologically," but to
undertake an ontological analysis of the concepts of being, understanding and
historicity. Hermeneutics is a means of narrating our own self-understanding
part of which is "a history of the present." Given that we cannot
transcend our historical horizon, situated as we are within culture and
society, our historicity informs our understanding of the historical. It's
therefore an illusion to think we freely interpret history. Before we begin to
study history we are already within it, and are involved in a dynamic process
of interpreting the past and fusing the horizons of the past and the present to
achieve an ultimate goal: our own self-understanding. Since we are always
already within history, it's illusory to think that the historical is
transparent to us, that it presents itself objectively, as it were.
Hermeneutics teaches us that it must be re-enacted by an interpretive act. On
this view, the meanings of things, texts and doings are grasped, not primarily
by appraising human intentionality, but by letting meanings come into the open
and speak to us. So we grasp textual meaning not by reconstructing authorial
intentions but by allowing its "truth" to speak to us directly.
However, since our historical situations are unique, we grasp a work always
differently, and always other than how the work was intended.
For
anyone who accepts the criticism of the nomological models of history, who does
not believe in essentialism, and understands the need to go beyond the
epistemological and methodological perspective of historicism, articulating an
ontological-hermeneutic philosophy of history seems the only plausible choice.
3. Ontological-hermeneutic
conception of historicity and the possibility of uniting history and philosophy
of science. A brief outline
My
aim in this section is not to give a normative answer to a question of how to
do the history and philosophy of science but rather to present briefly some
main ideas of Heidegger's ontology and to outline few modifications that allow
me to show a ground for unifying the philosophical and the historical views of
science.
There're
two ideas of Heidegger's ontology crucial here: (1) the idea of an
ontic-ontological circle and (2) the view that historicity is an ontological
structure of human existence.
3.1. The ontic-ontological circle
Ontic
studies refer to phenomena: they take for granted the subject/object dichotomy,
and deal with entities and facts or with events and processes understood
objectively, i.e., as they present themselves to an external observer.
Ontological inquiry problematizes the subject/object dichotomy itself and is
concerned primarily with the being of entities. The more fundamental nature of
ontological studies doesn't mean, however, that they're independent of ontic
studies. In fact, both form a circle, within which hermeneutic narrative and
ontological analysis of being complement each other.
In
Heidegger's ontology our being is primordially understood as the being of an
entity that "is concerned about
its very being." [28]
and is constituted as being-in-the-world. There's nothing mysterious in this
concept. On the contrary, it points to the familiar and commonplace, to what is
mostly transparent to us. It refers to the fact that we're never disengaged
spectators self-situated "outside" the world, who are forced to get
over to that world from a purely subjective starting point. We're always
already situated and can't step back from worldly involvements; our interest in
things, our responses to them, and our abilities to communicate about them are
already in play. That we are-in-the-world doesn't mean, however, that we are
objectively present within the world, i.e., that we are countable entities
among other beings comprising the totality of the world. To be-in-the-world
means to be together with the world and to take up relations to the world:
indeed, it is to have a world. We and our world are complementary and
equiprimordial.
Being-in-the-world
has different modes and knowing the world is one of them, by any means the most
primordial or the most immediate kind of being. For Heidegger, the original
function of cognition is existentialist rather than epistemic, and knowledge is
not taken for granted as a representational structure. Representing the world
becomes its secondary and derivative function. [29]
Moreover, Heidegger stresses that cognition belongs to the history-of-being and
this idea allows him to reveal the fundamentally historical nature of
cognition.
There's
an important point, however, where Heidegger's ontological analysis of
cognition and scientific research requires modification, namely, their
reduction to the way of being of Da-sein, which he understands
individualistically. For many reasons, cognition
should be understood as a (derivative) way of the being of communities, a
way of sociocultural communal being. And ontically it's realized in the form of
different sub-practices in which groups engage.
Thus,
scientific research is a way of our communal being and proceeds through
interrelations that connect scientific dialogue, scientific experience
(together with reality as experienced by scientists), and the participation of
scientific knowledge in technology. These interrelations are performed within
social structures and accordingly science can be considered as a sociocultural
system.
Ontologically,
scientific research, as a way of human being, has the structure of temporality
and historicity.
3.2. Historicity as the ontological
structure of being
Within
the ontic-ontological circle any ontological search for the structures and
features of being must be supplemented by the reconstitution of the historical
(ontic) dimension of our being because ontological structures and conditions
are always situated, in the sense that they always realize themselves within
history. Hence, considering entities and episodes within the ontic-ontological
circle reveals and establishes their historicity.
The
historicity and temporality of our existence cannot be viewed objectively
because they are essentially involved in our (self-)experience: they're the way
we experience ourselves and our world. Knowledge that refers to history, that
reflects on its temporality, can't take the form of a generalized explanatory
theory leading to prediction; it takes the form of a hermeneutic narrative,
since "the historicity of human experience can be brought to language only
as narrativity." [30]
Historical narratives are both about
the structure of human experience and of
that structure.
Narrativity
and historicity (together with temporality) are mutually dependent: time
becomes a human reality to the extent it is articulated through narrative and
any narrative belongs to history in two senses. It's situated within history
and it's a part of history, it contributes to making history. In narrative the
differences between the past, present, and future are not blurred, since past,
present, and future events are not subsumed under timeless laws. Narrative is
not a structure imposed on events from without; it's that which intrinsically
structures historical events. As Ricoeur emphasizes, an event is historical
insofar as it is incorporated within the plot of a story and in this way
contributes to the plot's development. [31]
Narrative "constructs meaningful totalities out of scattered events."
[32]
As narratively structured, events aren't simply "beads" on a string
ordered diachronically. They are joined together and given meaning. So
historical events are not pre-given but constituted in the very acts of
constructing a narrative. Understood in this way, narratives aren't
instantiations of realistic description, nor are they imperfect explanations
awaiting improvement, i.e., in need of explanatory supplementation by
underlying causes or regularities. What differentiates a narrative
understanding of history from (causal) nomological approaches is the central
role meanings play in historical understanding and in the dynamics of history
itself. [33]
For
hermeneutic understanding, which operates within historical narrative,
historical events aren't objective occurrences caused by earlier events, but
becomings inscribed with meanings. Meanings, unlike causes, move simultaneously
in both directions: from the past toward the present and from the present
toward the past. This allows us to understand that relations between historical
knowledge and past or future events, as well as relations between acts of
interpretation and interpreted occurrences or texts, are reciprocal. The
interpreter participates in making history and for this reason history cannot
be described objectively as a repetitive process, like natural sequences, or a
process of sheer accumulation. Hermeneutic understanding sees itself as
simultaneously shaped by tradition and by interpretations that will emerge in
the future. Such understanding contributes to making history; indeed "it
extends, furthers, and carries on history." [34]
Historical
narrative deals with the ontic dimension of history, so it can’t reveal the
ontological structure and constitution of the historical nature of our
existence. They require an ontological analysis.
Heidegger
offers an ontological conception of historicity that contains an idea of
crucial importance for any anti-naturalist and historicist view of history: human temporality is a necessary
ontological (precisely, existentialist) condition of history. In virtue of
this ontological condition history is a succession of generations. However,
Heideggerian ontological conception of history has one essential drawback: it
is existentialist. Dasein's historicity and world-history have their ultimate
ontological foundation in the temporality of Dasein. [35]
The ontological foundation of history cannot be reduced to the ontological
structure of Da-sein's being. Since Da-sein "understands itself in terms
of the possibilities of existence that 'circulate' in the actual 'average'
public interpretedness of Da-sein today." [36],
the ontological analysis of human historicity should find the ontological
foundation of traditions and heritage, as handed down to us, to be different
from the existentialist structures of Da-sein. In order to grasp an adequate
ontological sense of the traditions to which we belong and of the heritage
handed down to us, it is necessary--in my opinion--to accept that the historicity
of our communal being, which turns it into history, constitutes itself within the interrelations between the individual and
the social. As the temporality of an individual temporalizes, i.e., constitutes different modes of time and places
within them beings and ways of being, so the temporality of our communal being,
occurring as the succession of generations, historizes, i.e., occurs as history and places within it ways of
being. In other words, because of the temporality of the being of each of us
our communal being is temporal, and because of our communal being's historizing
the being of each of us is historical, i.e., it happens in an historical
situation.
Accordingly,
historicity of being doesn't mean the passage of objective time, or the fact
that something happens in world-history, or that being embodies historical
mechanisms; it means, rather, that time and history are constituted in their
different modes by our being and within it. To accept this idea of historicity
is to abandon both objectivist (nomological) and essentialist views of history,
to give up the search for external origins of human history and for invariant
principles, patterns, or mechanisms that drive human history; it is to
establish the source of the historicity of our being within our practice, which
turns out to be our self-making.
Our self-making, with
self-reflecting as its component, is the ontological structure of human being
and the ontological condition of history. Therefore, historicity is inseparable from
our self-constitution. "Man is what he becomes and has become; and the
processes of becoming which makes him distinctively human are historical. But
what makes history distinctively historical is human action." [37]
We belong to history not merely as a part and product of the historical
process; our being is active historizing, the very activity of making history.
Historizing
always proceeds in a situation. "Only a being which is a
self-making-in-a-situation can be, in its ontological constitution,
historical." [38]
However, contrary to Fackenheim, I think there's no necessity to presuppose
that this situation is a non-historical one. [39]
Our self-making and history are linked
within an ontic-ontological circle: history situates our self-making
ontically, i.e., it creates the various circumstances of our being (including
natural ones) that are objective for us, whereas our self-making is an
ontological condition of history since it's our communal activity that produces
history.
Science,
like all sub-practices, is part of our self-making. The historicity of science
means that its being-in-history is
self-making, even though science does not make itself up entirely but is
also made by other sub-practices.
Ontologically, science is the process of constituting itself, and science's
ontological structure manifests itself in its ontic development as described by
Nickles: "human knowledge has grown by means of a self-transforming,
dialectical or 'bootstrap' process, rooted in variation, selective retention,
and triangulation of historically available resources." [40]
Understanding
science's historicity as self-making precludes the need to posit non-historical
invariances to account for the internal continuity of science or to assume that
there's something common and essential to all instances of scientific change,
no matter how vague or general. [41]
In other words, continuance doesn't need to be identified with cross-historical
sameness, and doesn't need to be attributed to science with the help of a
universal model of theory-change or paradigm replacement. The continuity of science may be conceived
(and narrated) as a property of science that is created during the historical
activity of scientists, if it is created. Different episodes and epochs in the
history of science may be called "scientific" if they are placed
within a historical narrative: if they are seen as resulting from their
predecessors and be linked through them to the beginnings of science, and
interpreted as leading to contemporary science and the present mode of our
communal being. All these links are established within the history of science
that "narrates" itself and present themselves to us in detailed
historical studies of particular changes and developments in the sciences,
which use interpretative techniques appropriate to historical understanding and
not by a rational reconstruction of knowledge-construction. Nor can such
historical studies be reduced to pure hermeneutic interpretation of texts,
since the self-constituted forms of continuance in the scientific process are
not merely discursive and epistemic. They embrace all elements and aspects of
science understood as a sociocultural system.
4. Summary
Clio
and Minerva may meet and cooperate if they recognize and respect each other as
different. I believe that Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s ontological-hermeneutic
perspective, if suitably modified, allows the history and philosophy of science
to discourse effectively within an ontological-ontic circle, in which the
ontological analysis of scientific research viewed as a communal way of being
is connected with ontic studies of the social and historical nature of science.
Within this circle none has a privileged position, and none is entitled to
dominate or use the other.
This article first appeared in the Pittsburgh
Conference, History Unveiled Science Unfettered, January 2002.
ENDNOTES
[1] This
paper was presented at a workshop History
Unveiled, Science Unfettered organized in honor of James. E. McGuire by the
Dapartment of History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of
Pittsburgh, USA, in 2002.
[2] S. Shapin, "Discipline and Bounding: The
History and Sociology of Science as Seen Through the Externalism-Internalism
Debate", History of Science XXX
(1992), p. 336.
[3] P. Kitcher in his first 1992 Dijon lecture on The Role of the History of Science within
Philosophy of Science, unpublished.
[4] M. Wartofsky, "The relation between
philosophy of science and history of science". In: Models. Dordrecht: Reidel Publ. Comp., 1979, p. 122; also: P.
Machamer and F. Di Poppa, "Rational Reconstruction Revised", Theoria, 2001, pp. 461-480. Less
dogmatic adherents of normative philosophy of science, such as Newton-Smith,
Toulmin, Siegel, or Meynell, search for ontological or epistemological grounds
for the normative component of scientific rationality. They appeal to
constitutive characteristics of science itself, to the dictates of reason
linked to human survival, to common problems facing people in all cultures or
to trans-social mental faculties involved in cognitive self-transcendence. See:
J. E. McGuire, B. Tuchanska, Science
Unfettered. A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology. Athens,
Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000, pp. 277-9; W. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 255; S. E. Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. 1: General
Introduction and Part I.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972 p. 498; H. Meynell, "On
the Limits of the Sociology of Knowledge". Social Studies of Science 7 (1977), pp. 494-5.
[7] J. Passmore, "The Relevance of History to
the Philosophy of Science". In: Scientific
Explanation and Understanding. Essays on Reasoning and Rationality in Science.
N. Rescher (ed.). Lanham: Univeristy Press of America, 1983, p. 86.
[8] T. S. Kuhn, "The Halt and the Blind:
Philosophy and History of Science". The
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 31 (1980), p. 181.
[9] T. S. Kuhn, The
Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science. Robert and Maurine
Rotschild Distinguished Lecture, 19 November, 1991, Department of History of
Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 1992, p. 11.
[10] Ibidem, p. 13-14.
[11] Kitcher, first Dijon lecture, op. cit., p. 3-5.
[12] He attempts to naturalize the concept of
scientific rationality that is "agent-and context-specific" while
maintaining the normative character of methodology. Methodological rules are
not categorical but hypothetical imperatives "whose antecedent is a
statement about aims or goals, and whose consequent is the elliptical
expression of the mandated action". See: L. Laudan, Science and Values. The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific
Debate. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 50-62
and L. Laudan, "Progress or
Rationality? The Prospects for Normative Naturalism". American Philosophical Quarterly: 24 (1987), p. 24.
[13] Feyerabend's "dialectical", holistic,
and relativist, picture of the relation between reason and practice is
particularly insightful. Opposing Popper's way of objectifying the
methodological component of science, he subsumes it under the idealist
conception of the relation between reason and practice. The opposition to
idealism is naturalism, according to which reason is completely determined by
practice. Following Wittgenstein, Feyerabend claims that "standards or
rules are not independent of the material on which they act" and, accordingly,
treats them as two sides of (scientific) activity: "I regard every action
and every piece of research both as a potential instance of the application of
rules and as a test case". As acting may violate existing rules and change
them, so perseverance in following rules may change action. See: P. K.
Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason.
London: Verso, 1987, pp. 24, 26, 164-5.
[14] The bast known critic of the application of the
covering law model to historical events is William Dray.
[15] J. Margolis The
Flux of History and the Flux of Science. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993, pp. 159-61, 188-93. Also the models of Lakatos, Kuhn, Laudan,
Toulmin, Hull, or Giere represent the canonical view. For details of this
statement see: McGuire, Tuchanska, Science
Unfettered, op. cit., pp. 224-7.
[16] Margolis, The
Flux of History..., op. cit., p. 141. Hans Radder calls this approach
theoretical philosophy of science that "aims at exposing and examining
structural features that explain or make
sense of non-local patterns in the development of science" (Hans
Radder, "Philosophy and History of Science: Beyond the Kuhnian
Paradigm", Studies in the History
and Philosophy of Science: 28 (1997), p. 649).
[18] E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914 1991. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1994, pp. 199-227, 255-86, 320-71.
[19] J. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics. A Reading of Truth and Method. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985., p. 35. My position is much more radical than the
position expressed by Radder, who opts for a view "that does justice to
both the non-local patterns and the various ways in which they have been
materially and socially realized in particular local contexts" (Radder,
"Philosophy and History of Science...", op. cit., p. 650). The
difficulty that his view carries is how to distinguish between a non-local
pattern and its local, material and social, realization without either
metaphysical presuppositions or theoretical postulates.
[21] B. P. Dauenhauer, "History's Point and
Subject Matter: A Proposal". In: At
the Nexus of Philosophy and History. B. P. Dauenhauer (ed.). Athens,
Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1987, p. 167.
[24] See: H. Schnädelbach, German Philosophy 1831-1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984, Chap. 2.
[26] Ibidem, pp. 354-5.
[27] Ibidem, p. 358.
[28] M. Heidegger, Being and Time. J. Stambaugh (tr.). Albany: SUNY Press, 1996, 12. Following the usual
convention I use the pagination of the seventh German edition of 1953.
[30] P. Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function".
In: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences.
Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. J. B. Thompson (ed.&
tr.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 294.
[31] Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Time". In: On Narrative. W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.).
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 167; also p. 277 and Bernard
Dauenhauer, "History's Point and Subject Matter...", op. cit., pp.
164-5.
[33] This issue is discussed in details in McGuire,
Tuchanska, Science Unfettered, op.
cit., pp. 129-32, 184-5
[37] E. Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1961, p. 27.
[38] Ibidem, p. 37.
[39] Ibidem, pp. 42-43. Fackenheim states that
"if the doctrine of historicity is to be maintained, a qualitative
distinction between nature and history must somehow and somewhere be drawn. For
if it is not drawn, history reduces itself to a mere species of natural
process, different from other kinds only in that it happens in or to man. To
draw this distinction adequately, the terms 'natural event' and 'human action'
may not suffice.", ibidem, p. 21. It seems that he presupposes an ontology
according to which the natural is prior to the historical, if history may "reduce itself to a mere
species of natural process". The Heideggerian ontology does not contain
any such assumption.
[40] T. Nickles, "Good Science as Bad History:
From Order of Knowing to Order of Being." In: The Social Dimensions of Science. E. McMullin (ed.). Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, p. 113.