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History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Peter Galison
Peter Galison
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Department of Physics, and Program in the History of ScienceStanford University
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Abstract

Behind the dispute over the relative priority of theory and experiment lie conflicting philosophical images of the nature of scientific inquiry. One crucial image arose in the 1920s, when the logical positivists agitated for a “unity of science” that would ground all meaningful scientific activity on an observational foundation. Their goals and rhetoric dovetailed with the larger movements of architectural, literary, and philosophical modernism. Historians of science followed the positivists by tracking experimental science as the basis for scientific progress. After World War II, historians and philosophers of science created an antipositivist movement, inverting the positivist idea that observation had epistemic (and historical) priority. But this counter-movement retained the modernist aspiration to unity, now chaining observation to theory. Once again historians of science, following their philosophical colleagues, illustrated the new modernism with historical instances of observation dominated by theory.

Either reductionist scheme, by privileging one activity over the other, dictates an overly constrictive periodization. We need a wider class of periodization models (“central metaphors”) that will allow instrumentation, experimentation, and theory a partial autonomy without granting any one the sole legitimate narrative standpoint. Such a heterogeneous representation of historical traditions may, surprisingly, make better sense of the perceived coherence of activity across theoretical transitions than the monolithic modernist representation of science it displaces.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 197 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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