For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)

Roth contends that the controversy in the philosophy of the social sciences over the canons of rationality is the product of the mistaken belief in methodological exclusivism. Drawing on work in contemporary epistemology by W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend, he argues that no single theory of human behavior has methodological priority. He demonstrates how rejecting the notion of universal norms of social inquiry neither reduces epistemology to empirical psychology nor entails epistemological nihilism. He also traces the false presupposition (...) that modeling the social science on the natural sciences is the best method for inquiring into human affairs, examines and rejects specific formulations of methodological exclusivism; and advocates methodological pluralism, which incorporates both a type of methodological anarchism and a commitment to Quinean-style holism and empiricism. ISBN 0-8014-1941-7: $26.95. (shrink)

As a working hypothesis for philosophy of science, the unity of science thesis has been decisively challenged in all its standard formulations; it cannot be assumed that the sciences presuppose an orderly world, that they are united by the goal of systematically describing and explaining this order, or that they rely on distinctively scientific methodologies which, properly applied, produce domain-specific results that converge on a single coherent and comprehensive system of knowledge. I first delineate the scope of arguments against global (...) unity theses. However implausible old-style global unity theses may now seem, I argue that unifying strategies of a more local and contingent nature do play an important role in scientific inquiry. This is particularly clear in archaeology where, to establish evidential claims of any kind, practitioners must exploit a range of inter-field and inter-theory connections. At the same time, the robustness of these evidential claims depends on significant disunity between the sciences from which archaeologists draw background assumptions and auxiliary hypotheses. This juxtaposition of unity with disunity poses a challenge to standard positions in the debate about scientific unity. (shrink)

In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

This paper seeks to refute one variant of a view that scientific disciplines are intrinsically more objective than non?scientific ones, and that this greater objectivity explains increasing social agreement about the findings of science, by contrast with increasing disagreement about the findings of, e.g., ethics. Such a view rests on the implicit assumption that all forms of discourse aim equally at the generation of consensus; instead, differing degrees of consensus in different disciplines are often explicable by sociological, not metaphysical, differences (...) in the disciplines concerned. A detailed example is presented of a discipline (Indian folk dietary medicine) in which considerable lack of consensus is observed, for sociologically explicable reasons, in spite of its claims to scientific objectivity. It is concluded that disciplines may differ in the degree of truth of the claims advanced in them, and in the importance of consensus among their social aims. But neither of these is to be explained by differences in respect of some independent property of objectivity. (shrink)

Nicholas Rescher presents a critical reaction against two currently influential tendencies of thought. On the one hand, he rejects the facile relativism that pervades contemporary social and academic life. On the other hand, he opposes the rationalism inherent in neo-contractarian theory--both in the idealized communicative-contract version promoted in continental European political philosophy by J;urgen Habermas, and in the idealized social contract version of the theory of political justice promoted in the Anglo-American context by John Rawls. Against such tendencies, Rescher's pluralist (...) approach takes a more realistic and pragmatic line, eschewing the convenient recourse of idealization in cognitive and practical matters. Instead of a utopianism that looks to a uniquely perfect order that would prevail under ideal conditions, he advocates incremental improvements within the framework of arrangements that none of us will deem perfect but that all of us "can live with." Such an approach replaces the yearning for an unattainable consensus with the institution of pragmatic arrangements in which the community will acquiesce--not through agreeing on their optimality, but through a shared recognition among the dissonant parties that the available options are even worse. (shrink)

Feminist critiques of science provide fertile ground for any investigation of the ways in which social influences may shape the content of science. Many authors working in this field are from the natural and social sciences; others are philosophers. For philosophers of science, recent work on sexist and androcentric bias in science raises hard questions about the extent to which reigning accounts of scientific rationality can deal successfully with mounting evidence that gender ideology has had deep and extensive effects on (...) the development of many scientific disciplines.Feminist critiques of biology have been especially important in the political struggle for gender equality because biologically determinist arguments are so often cited to ‘explain’ women’s oppression. They explain why it is ‘natural’ for women to function in a socially subordinate role, why men are smarter and more aggressive than women, why women are destined to be homebodies, and why men rape. (shrink)

This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

Laudan constructs a fresh approach to a longtime problem for the philosopher of science: how to explain the simultaneous and widespread presence of both agreement and disagreement in science. Laudan critiques the logical empiricists and the post-positivists as he stresses the need for centrality and values and the interdependence of values, methods, and facts as prerequisites to solving the problems of consensus and dissent in science.

It is widely supposed that the scientists in any field use identical standards for evaluating theories. Without such unity of standards, consensus about scientific theories is supposedly unintelligible. However, the hypothesis of uniform standards can explain neither scientific disagreement nor scientific innovation. This paper seeks to show how the presumption of divergent standards (when linked to a hypothesis of dominance) can explain agreement, disagreement and innovation. By way of illustrating how a rational community with divergent standards can encourage innovation and (...) eventually reach consensus, recent developments in geophysics are discussed at some length. (shrink)

A conception of social epistemology is articulated with links to studies of science and opinion in such disciplines as history, sociology, and political science. The conception is evaluative, though, rather than purely descriptive. Three types of evaluative approaches are examined but rejected: relativism, consensualism, and expertism. A fourth, truth-linked, approach to intellectual evaluation is then advocated: social procedures should be appraised by their propensity to foster true belief. Standards of evaluation in social epistemics would be much the same as those (...) in individual epistemics, only the objects of evaluation would be interpersonal patterns of judgment and communication, and institutional practices that bear on opinion formation. (shrink)

The Description for this book, Theory and Evidence, will be forthcoming.

This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning by viewing meaning as (...) a certain kind of information-carrying role. (shrink)

The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in the medical humanities, and suggests that the answer is a function of growing technological and professional complexity. The next two sections examine the concept of consensus analytically, citing some of the recent philosophical literature. The fourth section looks at committee deliberations and their desirable outcomes, and questions the degree to which consensus serves those outcomes. In the fifth and last section it (...) is suggested that if I am to subscribe to a consensual outcome responsibly I must be personally committed to it, and that this requires a form of knowledge I call ‘fiduciary’, in this case knowledge of the competence and trustworthiness of other participants in deliberation whose expertise may have influenced my agreement. (shrink)

In this reprint of Law's Empire,Ronald Dworkin reflects on the nature of the law, its given authority, its application in democracy, the prominent role of interpretation in judgement, and the relations of lawmakers and lawgivers to the community on whose behalf they pronounce. For that community, Law's Empire provides a judicious and coherent introduction to the place of law in our lives.Previously Published by Harper Collins. Reprinted (1998) by Hart Publishing.

Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life. The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions.

Professor Hilary Putnam has been one of the most influential and sharply original of recent American philosophers in a whole range of fields. His most important published work is collected here, together with several new and substantial studies, in two volumes. The first deals with the philosophy of mathematics and of science and the nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry; the second deals with the philosophy of language and mind. Volume one is now issued in a new edition, including an (...) essay on the philosophy of logic first published in 1971. (shrink)

How can we know what really happened in the distant past in places like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Greece, and Rome, especially since the evidence is fragmentary and ancient cultures are so different from our own frame of reference? Scholars may examine historical documents and archaeological artifacts, and then make reasonable inferences. But in the final analysis there can be no absolute certainty about events far removed from present reality, and the past must be reconstructed by means of hypotheses that (...) coherently organize all available data. Knowledge claims about the past, and about many areas of science as well, rest on a network of interdependence between theory and evidence, and between interpretation and data. In this fascinating study of epistemology, philosopher Peter Kosso argues for a coherence model of epistemic justification. In the first part, the conceptual argument, he proposes a model of knowledge of the past. In the second part he presents three detailed case studies drawn from the work of historians and archaeologists. These studies are used to support and fine-tune the model outlined in the first part. Kosso presents many insights into the limits of knowledge and our ability to know the mental as well as the physical past. Historians, archaeologists, philosophers, and students interested in epistemology will find this accessible work to be of great value. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt to give an account of the analytic-synthetic distinction both inside and outside of physical theory. It is hoped that the paper is sufficiently nontechnical to be followed by a reader whose background in science is not extensive; but it has been necessary to consider problems connected with physical science (particularly the definition of 'kinetic energy,' and the conceptual problems connected with geometry) in order to bring out features of the analytic-synthetic distinction that seem to (...) me to be the most important. (shrink)