Building on my previous writings on presentism, pluralism, and “complementary science”, I develop an activist view of historiography. I begin by recognizing the inevitability of presentism. Our own purposes and perspectives do and should guide the production of our accounts of the past; like funerals, history-writing is for the living. There are different kinds of presentist history, depending on the historians’ purposes and perspectives. My particular inclination is pluralist. Science remembers its own history from a particular perspective, which views the (...) past as imperfect versions of the present; if professional historians of science shared this perspective, our work would be redundant. Instead, we can make it our task to illuminate the aspects of the past of science that scientists themselves tend to ignore and forget. History of science can also take a more productive role in the creation and improvement of scientific knowledge. Scientific progress as we know it tends to involve the shutting down of alternative paths of inquiry, resulting in a loss of potential and actual knowledge. A critical and sympathetic engagement with the past allows us to recover the lost paths, which can also suggest new paths. These points will be illustrated by a number of examples, especially from the history of chemistry and physics, including the recovery and extension of past experiments. (shrink)

In response to a recent argument by David Bloor, I argue that denying absolutes does not necessarily lead to relativism, that one can be a fallibilist without being a relativist. At issue are the empirical natural sciences and what might be called “framework relativism”, that is, the idea that there is always a conceptual scheme or set of practices in use, and all observations are theory-laden relative to the framework. My strategy is to look at the elements that define a (...) relativist stance and show where the pragmatic fallibilist disagrees. Defending the pragmatic notion of experience will be central, given that relativists reject the idea that experience can play a role in objectively justifying belief. We can reject all absolutes and start from the premise that everything is historical, contingent, and situated. One of the lessons of pragmatism is that universal and fixed principles are not necessary for objective knowledge. (shrink)

Modern standard big bang cosmology was preceded by a 15-year controversy with the rival steady-state theory of the universe. At a time when cosmologically relevant observations were scarce and cosmology was widely regarded as an immature science, or not a science at all, much of the debate took place by means of arguments that were essentially philosophical. Remarkably, professional philosophers, including some of the key figures of Anglo-American philosophy of science, took an active part in the debate; no less remarkably, (...) the involved astronomers and physicists sometimes listened to them. This article reviews the controversy over the steady-state theory as seen from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of science and offers an appraisal of how and to what extent philosophers and scientists entered a dialogue. -/- . (shrink)

Does a privileged frame of reference exist? Part of Einstein’s success consisted in eliminating Bergson’s objections to relativity theory, which were consonant with those of the most important scientists who had worked on the topic: Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz and Albert A. Michelson. In the early decades of the century, Bergson’s fame, prestige and influence surpassed that of the physicist. Once considered as one of the most renowned intellectuals of his era and an authority on the nature of time, The (...) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010) does not even include him under the entry of “time.” How was it possible to write off from history a figure that was once so prominent? Through an analysis of behind-the-scenes of science correspondence, this article traces the ascendance of Einstein's views of time at the expense of Bergson’s. (shrink)

Prompted by Hasok Chang’s conception of the history and philosophy of science (HPS) as the continuation of science by other means, I examine the possibility of obtaining scientific knowledge through philosophical criticism and reflection, in the light of four historical cases, concerning (i) the role of absolute space in Newtonian dynamics, (ii) the purported contraction of rods and retardation of clocks in Special Relativity, (iii) the reality of the electromagnetic ether, and (iv) the so-called problem of time’s arrow. In all (...) four cases it is clear that a better understanding of such matters can be achieved —and has been achieved— through conceptual analysis. On the other hand, however, it would seem that this kind of advance has more to do with philosophical questions in science than with narrowly scientific questions. Hence, if HPS in effect continues the work of science by other means, it could well be doing it for other ends than those that working scientists ordinarily have in mind. (shrink)