Introduction: History of Science and Philosophy of Science

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 difficult, 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 divergent viewpoints, but each of them develops specific 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). Although the history and the philosophy of science have often proceeded in considerable independence of one another, ever since Whewell's groundbreaking 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 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 scientific 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 scientific 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 scientific 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 sufficient 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 relevant history seriously or take cognizance of the new horizons opened up by recent historical studies of scientific 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 reinforced by the institutionalization of the two sorts of studies within distinct disciplines. ⁵ Nor has mutual understanding been helped by some ofthe attempts to utilize history of science as a tool for evaluating philosophical theories of scientific change, primarily understood as theory change. ⁶ One unhappy side effect of such work has been a silent sharpening of antagonisms, resting in part on the pursuit of different questions indifferent 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...