The Hungarian émigré Imre Lakatos earned a worldwide reputation through the influential philosophy of science debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Sir Karl Popper. In _Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason_ John Kadvany shows that embedded in Lakatos’s English-language work is a remarkable historical philosophy rooted in his Hungarian past. Below the surface of his life as an Anglo-American philosopher of science and mathematics, Lakatos covertly introduced novel transformations of Hegelian and Marxist ideas about historiography, skepticism, criticism, and (...) rationality. Lakatos escaped Hungary following the failed 1956 Revolution. Before then, he had been an influential Communist intellectual and was imprisoned for years by the Stalinist regime. He also wrote a lost doctoral thesis in the philosophy of science and participated in what was criminal behavior in all but a legal sense. Kadvany argues that this intellectual and political past animates Lakatos’s English-language philosophy, and that, whether intended or not, Lakatos integrated a penetrating vision of Hegelian ideas with rigorous analysis of mathematical proofs and controversial histories of science. Including new applications of Lakatos’s ideas to the histories of mathematical logic and economics and providing lucid exegesis of many of Hegel’s basic ideas, _Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason_ is an exciting reconstruction of ideas and episodes from the history of philosophy, science, mathematics, and modern political history. (shrink)

One of the major themes of Steve Fuller's project of social epistemology is a reconciliation of the normative concerns of epistemologists with the empirical concerns of sociologists of knowledge. Fuller views social epistemologists as knowledge policy makers, who will provide direction for improvements in the cognitive division of labour. However, this paper argues that Fuller's conception of knowledge production and his approval of a panglossian approach to epistemology fail to provide the normative force he claims, and leave us unable to (...) identify anything epistemic about our knowledge-seeking practices. (shrink)

"The Invention of Modern Science proposes a fruitful way of going beyond the apparently irreconcilable positions, that science is either "objective" or "socially constructed." Instead, suggests Isabelle Stengers, one of the most important and influential philosophers of science in Europe, we might understand the tension between scientific objectivity and belief as a necessary part of science, central to the practices invented and reinvented by scientists."--pub. desc.

This ground-breaking text offers a fresh perspective on the governance of science from the standpoint of social and political theory. Science has often been seen as the only institution that embodies the elusive democratic ideal of the 'open society'. Yet, science remains an elite activity that commands much more public trust than understanding, even though science has become increasingly entangled with larger political and economic issues.

We tend to believe both that our current criteria of theory choice pick out the theories which we have most reason to believe are true, and that most of the theories which we believe to be true are likely to be someday shown false. It seems, then, that when theory choices are regarded in historical perspective, rationality pulls in two opposite directions, which I call "bounded" and "critical" rationality. The critical rationalist is the revolutionary scientist or the prescient lawgiver--someone whose (...) beliefs cannot be justified by his own criteria and so therefore restructures the criteria to make his belief justifiable. The ultimate beneficiary of this move is the bounded rationalist, someone who lives after the revolutionary and makes the latter's actions seem optimally rational by showing how they legitimate the worldview of the bounded rationalist. Bounded rationality, in this sense, occurs in Whiggish histories of science and judicial attempts at squaring particular decisions with the legal tradition. We consider both these cases in some detail, arguing that more than an ideological strategy, bounded rationality is a necessary response to the problem of being faced with a historical record which suggests that all the criteria of a good theory or a good law cannot be jointly maximized. (shrink)