Ferment in Philosophy of Science: A Review Discussion

FERMENT IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: A Review Discussion * IT MIGHT SEEM appropriate to begin this survey with the claim that several of the books under discussion document the change that has taken place in philosophy of science since the early 1960s. That would reflect a widespread conception among practitioners in the field. Yet philosophy of science, if one construes the discipline broadly enough, is and always has been a remarkably diverse field-even in the preKuhnian heyday of logical empiricism. If, as seems reasonable, we take Rudolf Carnap's Logical Foundations of Probability (1950) as at once the culmination of the logical positivist program and a point of departure, the first thing to note is that the work appeared only shortly before R. B. Braithwaite's less rigid Scientific Explanation (1953) and Stephen Toulmin's even more adventuresome Philosophy of Science (1953) . And Thomas Kuhn's first contribution, The Copernican Revolution (1957) , did not follow far behind. N. R. Hanson's Patterns of Discovery (1958) and Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1st ed., 1962) virtually coincide with the appearance of Karl Popper's Logic of Scientifio Discovery (1959), Ernest Nagel's classic, The Structure of Science (1961), and The Library of Living Philosophers volume, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (1963) . Of course Carl Hempel, in his Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965) and in his useful textbook Philosophy of Natural Science (1966) , would totally ignore it, but one should not forget Herbert Marcuse's attack on logical empiricism in One-Dimensional Man (1964). Other evidence of diversity in the period that ranges right up to the appearance of the books to be discussed here includes two useful historical anthologies, Joseph 690 FERMENT IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 691 Kockelmans's Philosophy of Science: The Historic