In a famous debate between Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, Popper accused Kuhn and Quine of propagating the “Myth of the Framework”: that some broad set of specific background commitments are required for interlocutors to be able to have a fruitful conversation. The Myth of the Framework could be used to argue for a beneficial version of the canon: that training in these shared background commitments allows for the growth of a robust community of inquiry. Popper argues, however, that the (...) position that truth or inquiry can be framework-dependent is a pernicious form of relativism, and undermines the possibility of rational inquiry. I subject Popper’s view to criticism, showing that it can be used to undermine “orthodoxy” and the canon in some ways, but that it props up the canon in others. In closing, the paper examines the connections between Popper’s position on the community of inquiry and standpoint epistemology, and argues for the claim that Popper’s view, to be persuasive, requires a more robust account of how critical inquiry relies on the evaluative capacities of rational agents within a community. (shrink)

Two questions should be considered when assessing the Kantian dimensions of Kuhn’s thought. First, was Kuhn himself a Kantian? Second, did Kuhn have an influence on later Kantians and neo-Kantians? Kuhn mentioned Kant as an inspiration, and his focus on explanatory frameworks and on the conditions of knowledge appear Kantian. But Kuhn’s emphasis on learning; on activities of symbolization; on paradigms as practical, not just theoretical; and on the social and community aspects of scientific research as constitutive of scientific reasoning, (...) are all outside the Kantian perspective. Kuhn’s admiration for Kant is tempered by his desire to understand the processes of learning, of initiation into a scientific community, of experimentation using instruments, and of persuasion, drawing on the work of familiar influences, including Piaget, Koyré, and Wittgenstein, and less familiar ones, including Langer, Demos, and Frank. Both Kuhn and Kant were interested in the question: what is the status of science, and what is the role of the scientist in its development and justification? But Kuhn presents science in a much more messy, historically contingent, and socially charged way than Kant does. The paper’s conclusion evaluates Kuhn’s reception among researchers including Richardson and Friedman, assessing the prospects for future work. (shrink)

Moti Mizrahi has argued that Thomas Kuhn does not have a good argument for the incommensurability of successive scientific paradigms. With Rouse, Andersen, and others, I defend a view on which Kuhn primarily was trying to explain scientific practice in Structure. Kuhn, like Hilary Putnam, incorporated sociological and psychological methods into his history of science. On Kuhn’s account, the education and initiation of scientists into a research tradition is a key element in scientific training and in his explanation of incommensurability (...) between research paradigms. The first part of this paper will explain and defend my reading of Kuhn. The second part will probe the extent to which Kuhn’s account can be supported, and the extent to which it rests on shaky premises. That investigation will center on Moti Mizrahi’s project, which aims to transform the Kuhnian account of science and of its history. While I do defend a modified kind of incommensurability, I agree that the strongest version of Kuhn’s account is steadfastly local and focused on the practice of science. (shrink)

Without doubt, there is a great diversity of scientific images both with regard to their appearances and their functions. Diagrams, photographs, drawings, etc. serve as evidence in publications, as eye-catchers in presentations, as surrogates for the research object in scientific reasoning. This fact has been highlighted by Stephen M. Downes who takes this diversity as a reason to argue against a unifying representation-based account of how visualisations play their epistemic role in science. In the following paper, I will suggest an (...) alternative explanation of the diversity of scientific images. This account refers to processes which are caused by the social setting of science. What exactly is meant by this, I will spell out with the aid of Ludwik Fleck’s theory of the social mechanisms of scientific communication. (shrink)

At first glance there seem to be many similarities between Thomas S. Kuhn’s and Ludwik Fleck’s accounts of the development of scientific knowledge. Notably, both pay attention to the role played by the scientific community in the development of scientific knowledge. But putting first impressions aside, one can criticise some philosophers for being too hasty in their attempt to find supposed similarities in the works of the two men. Having acknowledged that Fleck anticipated some of Kuhn’s later theses, there seems (...) to be a temptation in more recent research to equate both theories in important respects. Because of this approach, one has to deal with the problem of comparing the most notable technical terms of both philosophers, namely ‘‘thought style’’ and ‘‘paradigm’’. This paper aims at a more thorough comparison between Ludwik Fleck’s concept of thought style and Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. Although some philosophers suggest that these two concepts are essentially equal in content, a closer examination reveals that this is not the case. This thesis of inequality will be defended in detail, also taking into account some of the alleged similarities which may be responsible for losing sight of the differences between these theories. (shrink)

This article delves into the work of a researcher group based around the Center for Theoretical Archaeology in Belgrade and the path they have taken to establish a foundation for further archaeological development within Serbia. This process illuminates the conceptual tools Fleck originally formulated - thought collectives, thought style, proto-ideas – which have played a significant role in the deconstruction of the concept of scientific fact and in the historicization / socialization of the theory of knowledge. For the Serbian archaeological (...) community, one of the most fiendish aspects has been the ever present correlation between the field and the construction of a national identity - an especially painful theme for the postwar Balkans whose borders are still imprecisely defined. Hence, this work pays special attention to long held beliefs of ethnicity, ethnogenesis and continuity, emanating from outdated racial anthropology, but unfortunately still held as fact in Serbian archaeology. (shrink)

I examine the influence of James B. Conant on the writing of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. By clarifying Conant’s influence on Kuhn, I also clarify the influence that others had on Kuhn’s thinking. And by identifying the various influences that Conant had on Kuhn’s view of science, I identify Kuhn’s most original contributions in Structure. On the one hand, I argue that much of the framework and many of the concepts that figure in Structure were part of Conant’s picture (...) of science, a picture that figured prominently in the general education natural science courses that Conant taught at Harvard. On the other hand, I show that Kuhn’s Structure contains important contributions that do not figure in Conant’s picture of science. I argue that the following three themes in Structure do not originate with Conant: (1) the concept of “normal science”; (2) “the problem of scientific revolutions,” that is, the apparent threat posed by radical changes of theory in science; and (3) Kuhn’s emphasis on the social dimensions of science, specifically the social structure of research communities. (shrink)

Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thought-styles has been hailed as a pioneer of constructivist science studies and sociology of scientific knowledge. But this consensus ignores an important feature of Fleck’s epistemology. At the core of his account is the ideal of ‘objective truth, clarity, and accuracy’. I begin with Fleck’s account of modern natural science, locating the ideal of scientific objectivity within his general social epistemology. I then draw on Fleck’s view of scientific objectivity to improve upon reflexive accounts of the (...) origin and development of the theory of thought-styles, and reply to objections that Fleck’s epistemological stance is self-undermining or inconsistent. Explicating the role of scientific objectivity in Fleck’s epistemology reveals his view to be an internally consistent alternative to recent social accounts of scientific objectivity by Harding, Daston and Galison. I use these contrasts to indicate the strengths and weaknesses of Fleck’s innovative social epistemology, and propose modifications to address the latter. The result is a renewed version of Fleck’s social epistemology, which reconciles commitment to scientific objectivity with integrated sociology, history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper discusses essential elements of the philosophical works of Ludwik Fleck and their potential interpretation for the teaching and learning of science. In the early twentieth century, Fleck made substantial contributions to understanding the sociological character of the nature of science and explaining the embedding of science in society. His works have several parallels to the later and very popular work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn, although Kuhn only indirectly referred to the influence of Fleck (...) on his own theories. Starting from a short review of the life of Ludwik Fleck, his philosophical work and its connections to Kuhn, this paper elaborates upon and illustrates how his theories can be considered for science education in order to provide learners with a better understanding of the nature of scientific endeavor and the bi-directional science-to-society links. (shrink)

Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact foregrounds claims traditionally excluded from reception, often regarded as opposed to fact, scientific claims that are increasingly seldom discussed in connection with philosophy of science save as examples of pseudoscience. I am especially concerned with scientists who question the epidemiological link between HIV and AIDS and who are thereby discounted—no matter their credentials, no matter the cogency of their arguments, no matter the sobriety of their statistics—but also with other classic examples of (...) so-called pseudoscience including homeopathy and other sciences, such as cold fusion. The pseudoscience version of the demarcation problem turns out to include some of the details that Latour articulates multifariously under a variety of species or kinds in his essay/interactive research project/monograph, ‘Biography of an Investigation’. Given the economic constraints of the current day, especially in the academy, the growing trend in almost all disc.. (shrink)

Popular science writing has received increasing interest, especially in its relation to professional science. I extend the current scholarly focus from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by providing a microhistory of the early popular writings of evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. Linking them to the state of evolutionary biology as a professional science as well as Maynard Smith’s own professional standing, I examine the interplay between author, text and audiences. In particular, I focus on Maynard Smith’s book The Theory (...) of Evolution and show how he used it to both promote neo-Darwinism and advocate the utility of mathematics in biology. Following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and David Lack, Maynard Smith was a science communicator blurring the lines between genres and audiences while contributing to ongoing discussions within and on the profession of evolutionary biology around the Darwin-Wallace centenary. (shrink)