Much of the focus on Poincaré’s philosophy of science has been on the notion of convention, a crucial concept that has become distinctive of his position. However, other notions have received much less attention. That is the case of verifiable hypotheses. This kind of hypotheses seems to be constituted from the generalization of several observable facts. So, in order to understand what these hypotheses are, we need to know what a fact to Poincaré is. He divides facts into brute and (...) scientific facts. The characterization of this duality is not trivial at all, and leads us to the following questions that we will discuss in this paper: which the part of construction that exists in a scientific fact and which the part of translation, that is, what remains from the brute fact in the scientific one?; and when we conceive a generalized hypothesis, are we supposed to do it from scientific or from brute facts? The clarification of these questions could lead to distinguish the part of construction and the part of translation in the first steps of science, which is essential to get a better understanding of Poincaré’s conception of science. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of nineteenth-century French spiritualism, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice which consists in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this article, I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the (...) result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existent spiritualist framework, between, on the one hand, neo-Kantianism and, on the other hand, evolutionism which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

For many decades, Duhem has been considered a paradigmatic instrumentalist, and while some commentators have argued against classifying him in this way, it still seems prevalent as an interpretation of his philosophy of science. Yet such a construal bears scant resemblance to the views presented in his own works—so little, indeed, that it might be said to constitute no more than a mere phantom with respect to his actual thought. In this article, we aim to deconstruct this phantom, tracing the (...) sources of the misconceptions surrounding his ideas and pinpointing the sources and/or causes of its proliferation. We subsequently point out and discuss those elements of his philosophy that, taken together, support the view of him as a scientific realist of a sophisticated kind. Finally, we defend our own interpretation of his thought against suggestions to the effect that it is oriented towards neither instrumentalism nor scientific realism. (shrink)