Science Unfettered: A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorial Ontology (review)

As Ian Hacking wrote about social construction, it is often beneficial when confronted with a new perspective to ask "What is the point?" rather than "What is it?" In other words, what can science studies gain from adopting the views of Science Unfettered? I would argue that it is not clear that we gain a great deal. The largest problem of the book is that McGuire and Tuchańska do not adequately characterize the current state of play in the fields they are criticizing: the sociology, history, and philosophy of science. The result is that the promised benefits of their phenomenological approach are already being accrued in these disciplines.

One example of the problem is the historicity of science. The authors maintain that for a truly philosophical account of science to fully account for the historicity of science, it must start by abandoning the subject/object dichotomy and adopting a phenomenological/hermeneutic perspective on science. Following Heidegger, the authors draw a distinction between ontic studies that take the subject/object dichotomy as their basis—trying to understand entities and events within that framework—and an ontological inquiry that attempts to go beyond the subject/object dichotomy and focuses instead on being rather than events or objects. Borrowing Gadamer's hermeneutic stance, they study a text "in terms of what is stated in the text, what the text tells us, and not in terms of what it expresses." Following Nietzsche, McGuire and Tuchańska reject substance ontology, or the view that reality is made up of underlying things that interact. This notion of underlying substances is illusory, Nietzsche argued; there is just the activity itself—hence McGuire and Tuchańska claim that process ontology, which sees the ontological reality of interaction and being rather than of the object or event, is the fundamental ontology that needs to underpin a philosophical understanding of the historicity of science.

For the authors, the ontic approach assumes that "(1) history is an objective passage of events in the flow of time, and (2) historical episodes are independent atoms of history." By contrast, they argue that "we believe that the historical does not speak for itself. It must be reenacted by an interpretive act." Certainly the contrasts between the two approaches are deep as presented. Unfortunately I doubt that historians of science or contemporary philosophers of history would ever deny the interpretive nature of historical work within the ontic perspective and would reject many of the objectivist views that McGuire and Tuchańska ascribe to them.

McGuire and Tuchańska offer no examples of current historical practice that fits their definition. Indeed the example of "essentialist" history they offer is Augustine's City of God, which few would take to be a typical example of contemporary historical work. A particularly egregious mischaracterization of the historical enterprise is McGuire and Tuchańska's claim that the "naturalist" approach to history holds that "only if temporal events are subsumed under…universal laws can they be described, explained, predicted, and—it is hoped—manipulated." But, who in contemporary history or philosophy of history actually maintains such a view? Perhaps, the only scholar in the twentieth century who consistently maintained that historical explanation must proceed by subsuming historical events under universal covering laws was Carl Hempel, and even he did not maintain that historians ever actually explained historical events in this way, only that they should if they wanted history to be considered a science. Hempel's attempt to extend the covering-law model to history, where it was manifestly unsuitable, was one of his more spectacular failures. It is not clear, then, on what basis McGuire and Tuchańska claim that the covering-law model reflects current understandings of historical practice. One can certainly believe in the subject/object distinction while at the same time rejecting the idea that a complete, objective account of the past is possible.

Further, many of the promised benefits from adopting their ontological...