Introduction: History of Science and Philosophy of Science

Friedrich Steinle and Richard M. Burian

The four papers and the comment that make up the bulk of this issue of Perspectives on Science, originated in a session organized by Friedrich Steinle for a meeting of the History of Science Society in Denver in 2001. We were struck by the extent to which, in spite of their differences, each of the papers managed to surmount some of the obstacles that beset the delicate, and sometimes difªcult, relationship between history of science and philosophy of science. The authors have reworked their papers to highlight the intimate interactions in their work between detailed history of science and some core issue(s) in philosophy of science. The papers deal with different historical episodes and the authors speak from distinctively diver- gent viewpoints, but each of them develops speciªc ways of intertwining historical and philosophical work in ways that improve both the historical studies and the philosophical analysis. This is an accomplishment of no small importance. Attempts to bring historical and philosophical studies of science into close contact with one another have a relatively long history. During an important formative period for the philosophy of science in the nineteenth century, many authors, perhaps most notably William Whewell, sought to base general accounts of science on serious studies of its history (see The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History, 1840). Al- though the history and the philosophy of science have often proceeded in considerable independence of one another, ever since Whewell’s ground- breaking work there have been notable attempts to provide a historical footing for general philosophies of science. One need only think of Duhem or Mach or, since the 1960s, Hacking, Kuhn, Lakatos, Latour, and Laudan—and many more. Recently, however, mainstream history of science and mainstream philosophy of science have gone in different directions. History of science

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tends to treat science as a cultural phenomenon and to require thorough contextualization as a sine qua non for understanding particular episodes, disciplines, and practices. But all too often, we think, questions about knowledge, about the epistemic process itself, disappear from view in such contexts.1 In contrast, philosophy of science, still caught in the aftermath of logical empiricism, has tended to focus on structures of argumentation, debates about scientiªc realism, formalized evaluation of empirical support for theoretical claims, proper use of probability considerations, and the like.2 More often than not, philosophers of science have not taken historical perspectives on the cultural embeddedness of scientiªc knowledge into account. In spite of numerous exceptions,3 we believe that there is a growing gulf between philosophical studies of conceptual change on the one hand, and cultural studies of scientiªc practices (which have recently helped to reshape the history of science) on the other. Scholars on the two sides of this divide have not taken sufªcient cognizance of one another. It is indicative that most publications in the history of science do not address changes in epistemic perspectives and standards and that the majority of publications in philosophy of science do not take the details of the rele- vant history seriously or take cognizance of the new horizons opened up by recent historical studies of scientiªc practices, instruments, and material cultures, or the social steering of problems studied, and so on.4 In the Anglophone countries, at least, these tendencies have been rein- forced by the institutionalization of the two sorts of studies within dis- tinct disciplines.5 Nor has mutual understanding been helped by some of the attempts to utilize history of science as a tool for evaluating philosophical theories of scientiªc change, primarily understood as theory

1. Latour and Woolgar (1979), Shapin and Schaffer (1985), Collins (1985), Schiebinger (1993), Shapin (1994), Morus (1998), Knorr-Cetina (1999), Spary (2000), for example. 2. van Fraassen (1980), Glymour (1980), Hintikka (1991), Carrier (1994), Rosenberg (1994), Mayo (1996), for example. 3. For example, Howard (1986), Galison (1987), Gooding (1990) Buchwald (1992), Rheinberger (1997), Burian (1997), Epple (1999), Graßhoff et al. (2000), Daston (2000), Renn et al. (2001), Steinle (2002). 4. We believe this point is valid internationally. It is exempliªed by the slight amount of overlap in recent programs of the HSS and the PSA. Other symptoms include how little philosophical analysis is included in recent collections of readings in science studies and history of science intended for classroom use in teaching (e.g., Biagioli [1999] and Hagner [2001]) and the near exclusion of work employing the new strands in history of science from programs in the philosophy of science. 5. This separation of disciplines is, of course, contingent. Contrast, for example, the case of France, where history of science is commonly treated as falling within épistémologie, the meaning of which is closer to Anglophone philosophy of science than it is to epistemology. There, much of the published work in history of science is written by scholars whose insti- tutional location is in philosophy rather than history or history of science.

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change.6 One unhappy side effect of such work has been a silent sharpen- ing of antagonisms, resting in part on the pursuit of different questions in different styles: particularizing vs. generalizing, contextualizing vs. decontextualizing, using actor’s categories vs. those of the present, etc. We say “silent” because there has been relatively little explicit debate, recently at least, about what the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science could or should be, about what possibly could be gained from a closer interaction, about how the relationship could be improved, or about the extent to which each discipline should be responsible to the other.7 There is the remarkable fact, however, that dichotomies and antagonisms similar to those that have arisen between historical and philosophical approaches to science have arisen within science itself. Science, of course, is a human enterprise, carried out by people embedded in particular historical, social, and material situations and driven by a variety of (often conºicting) epistemic and non-epistemic interests. Yet science aims at knowledge and claims general validity for its results. Its practitioners are typically quite aware that their particular experiences are subjective and colored by situational speciªcities, yet they generally hold that the knowledge created goes far beyond the particular cases that they have studied—indeed, that they have failed in their enterprise if they have not achieved generality. This conviction is not marginal. On the contrary, it reºects a key meta-epistemological commitment (to employ a term from Jutta Schickore’s paper in this issue) that guides many scientists’ research, namely, a commitment to the idea that science can achieve generality. Scientiªc research and knowledge generation are located precisely at the ever-shifting boundary between the particular and the general, the local and the global—and this might even be counted as one of its deªning fea- tures. Thus, the tensions between the particular and general and between what François Jacob calls “night science” and “day science” (Jacob 1998), are deeply embedded within science. A persistent challenge for any at- tempt to understand the workings and the history of science is to take

6. Two examples: (1) Imre Lakatos’s use of history of science in footnotes to show depar- tures of actual history from the ideals put forward in his “methodology of scientiªc research programmes.” Lakatos’s support of this use of history was published together with some attacks on his approach in his (1971). (2) The use of case studies to test some of the claims put forward by competing philosophies of science in Donovan et al. (1988). 7. The debate of the 1970s (e.g., McMullin [1970], Giere [1973], McMullin [1976], Burian [1977], Krüger [1979]) seems mainly to have faded out, and scarcely to have been taken up again, as it was, by way of exception, in the 1992 PSA symposium, “What has the history of science to say to the philosophy of science” (with an introduction by Michael Ruse and contributions by David Hull, Rachel Laudan, Robert J. Richards, and Marga Vicedo), pp. 467–496 in Hull et al. (1993).

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those tensions at face value and to provide a place for them in both historical and philosophical treatments of scientiªc investigations. In the face of that challenge, the question whether history and philosophy of science should be intimately linked seems to be ill-posed. Rather, it will take serious argument to convince us that these disciplines, which take autonomous approaches to one and the same subject—science—can be appropriately pursued without taking signiªcant cognizance of each other’s ªndings. We suggest that it is necessary and will be valuable to ex- plore the parallels between the ways that those tensions play out within science and the ways that they are reºected in the relationship between history and philosophy of science. This exploration may well help to clar- ify a central epistemological dilemma faced (perhaps on different levels) both in the sciences and in meta-studies of science. Thus the observation that (in spite of praiseworthy exceptions) history of science and philosophy of science appear by and large to be drifting apart makes us uneasy, for it puts us in danger of losing sight of a core problem for understanding the character of scientiªc research. As François Jacob (1998) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) have stressed in different ways, the epistemic situation of scientists who are convinced that there is a general answer to some major puzzle is often deeply affected by a mismatch between their conceptual categories and their practices. Both historians and philosophers of science, too, are grop- ing for ways to obtain a better match between their conceptual categories and their practices. In this regard, it is no accident that all the papers in this symposium touch deeply on the problem of ªnding appropriate categories in which to describe or analyze the experience and experimental ªndings in particular domains. Steinle does so in the context of “exploratory experimentation” in electricity and magnetism, Schickore in dealing with the sources and conceptualizations of error in microscopy, Janssen in devising and supporting “common origin inferences” for striking unex- plained coincidences in a number of domains, and Gal in coping with the impact of historicist and constructivist analyses (e.g., of Newton’s optics) of scientiªc realism—especially in the light of Latour’s recent historical and conceptual studies that disrupt the previous debates on these topics. In all of these papers, the close interweaving of historical and epistemological considerations is not a luxury or a side-beneªt of speciªc historical or philosophical analyses of science, but a crucial element, providing key insights into the analysis of the structure of scientiªc work, the practices of scientists, and/or the meta-scientiªc apparatus required to analyze scientiªc work. The papers thus demonstrate, we believe, the value of reciprocal engagement between historical and philosophical approaches to speciªc

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scientiªc material. They illustrate our claim that historians, philosophers, and science studies scholars more generally need to engage with the tensions between their disciplines and put those tensions to fruitful use. In- deed, we take doing so to be a central challenge for any full-blooded account of the history and the workings of science, i.e., for any study of the interrelations among social settings, practices, material cultures, and instances of conceptual and theoretical change.

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