Realism about the external world enjoys little philosophical support these days. I rectify this predicament by taking a relatively pragmatist line of thought to defend commonsense realism; I support commonsense realism through an interpretation and application of Donald Davidson’s notion of triangulation, the triangle composed of two communicators coordinating and correcting their responses with a shared causal stimulus. This argument is important because it has a crucial advantage over the often used abductive argument for realism. My argument avoids unwarranted conclusions, (...) whereas the abductive argument is “inflationary” because it reaches beyond the limits of evidence for its realist conclusion. To illustrate the problems of the abductive argument and motivate my Davidsonian approach, I take a brief look at the abductive argument for realism in Frederick Will’s work. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new way to integrate historical accounts of social interaction in scientific practice with philosophical examination of scientific knowledge. The relation between descriptive accounts of scientific practice, on the one hand, and normative accounts of scientific knowledge, on the other, is a vexed one. This vexatiousness is one instance of the gap between normative and descriptive domains. The general problem of the normative/descriptive divide takes striking and problematic form in the case of social aspects of (...) scientific knowledge. With respect to this issue, history and philosophy of science appear starkly incompatible. I show how this dualism can be overcome, drawing on social action theory and the recent history of cellular immunology. (shrink)

In the philosophy of chemistry a view is developed according to which laws of nature and scientific theories are peculiar in chemistry. This view was criticized in an earlier issue of the Foundations of Chemistry (Vihalemm, Foundation of Chemistry 5(1): 7–22, 2003) referring to an essay by Maureen and John Christie (Christie and Christie, in N. Bushan and S. Rosenfeld (Eds.), Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on Chemistry. Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, pp. 34–50). This criticism was (...) responded by the Christies (Christie and Christie, Foundations of Chemistry 5(2): 165–177, 2003). In the present article the debate is continued. The main issues which need to be elucidated in order to carry the analysis forward are pointed out and discussed. The relevance of a theoretical model of science for the philosophy of chemistry is stressed. (shrink)

This paper discusses the tenets of the politics of postmodern philosophy of science. At issue are Rouse's version of naturalism and his reading of Quine's distinction between the indeterminacy of translation and the underdetermination of theories by empirical evidence. I argue that the postmodern approach to science's research practices as patterns of interaction within the world is not in line with the naturalistic account Rouse aims at. I focus also on Rouse's readings of Heidegger's existential conception of science and Kuhn's (...) concept of normal science. Finally, a strategy of defending science's cognitive distinctiveness in terms of hermeneutic philosophy is suggested as an alternative to the postmodern philosophy of science. (shrink)

The new social theories of practice have been inspired by Wittgenstein's late philosophy, phenomenology and more recent sociological theories. They regard embodied skills and routinized, mostly unconscious habits as a key foundation of human practice and knowledge. This position leads to an overstatement of the significance of the habitual dimension of practice. As several critics have suggested this approach omits the problems of transformative agency and change of practices. In turn classical practice theories, activity theory and pragmatism have analyzed the (...) mechanisms of change. Pragmatism suggests that a crisis of a habit calls for reflection. Through working hypotheses and experimentation this leads to a transformation of a practice. Activity theory introduced the concept of remediation. A collective elaboration of shared mediational artefacts is needed to transform an activity. (shrink)

In Heidi Grasswick?s response to ??Epistemological communities? and the problem of epistemic agency,? she criticizes my move to reconceptualize epistemology as an affair primarily centered on epistemic practises instead of epistemic agency. In this paper, I address some of Grasswick?s counterpoints, and I restate my argument for why epistemology should be centered on practises instead of epistemic agency. However, to advance the discussion, I urge that a more fruitful dialogue would engage looking at what consequences and advantages might follow from (...) reframing epistemology around practises. Therefore, I entertain an additional advantage this turn to practises makes regarding the danger of apriorism, the prior construction and application of theoretical structures upon groups of people and their practises without consideration for the actuality of these people and their practises. I argue that reorientating one?s epistemology around practises gives adequate grounds to avoid aprioristic tendencies, whereas an epistemology primarily centered on epistemic agency can fall into trouble. (shrink)

Many young dreamers who want to be modern up to the tips of their toes, and who think they have gotten rid of these barely imaginable old-fashioned ideas, are, without realizing it, mystics in search of a spiritual experience. (Gauchet 2003, p. 311)Several sociologists of science have mobilized secularization metaphors to describe developments in the study of science. Similar to how secularization refers to a decreasing status of religion and God as a transcendent factor in society, the secularization of science (...) refers to an abandonment of Science as something “sacred” and Nature as transcendent. This article aims to explore these secularization metaphors, by arguing for a parallel between how sociologists and philosophers of religion differ and how similar disagreements between sociologists of science and the work of Bruno Latour exist, whose work should rather be linked with that of other philosophers, such as Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. (shrink)

This article responds to Schulz's criticisms of an earlier paper published in Educational Philosophy and Theory. The purpose in this paper is to clarify and extend some of my earlier arguments, to indicate what is unfortunate (i.e. what is lost) from a non‐charitable, modernist reading of Lyotardian postmodernism (despite its weaknesses), and to suggest what new directions are emerging in science education from efforts to move beyond an either/or dichotomy of foundationalism and relativism.

This paper explains why Clark’s Extended Mind thesis is not capable of sufficiently grasping how and in what sense external objects and technical artifacts can become part of our human cognition. According to the author, this is because a pivotal distinction between inside and outside is preserved in the Extended Mind theorist’s account of the relation between the human organism and the world of external objects and artifacts, a distinction which they proclaim to have overcome. Inspired by Charles S. Peirce’s (...) philosophy of mind, in particular, the author tries to find a way out of this ‘inside–outside’ fallacy. External objects, artifacts or processes should, according to him, not be conceived as inanimate and unintelligent matter utilised by a separately living, inner mental sphere that has set certain pre-established goals for itself. Mind has rather an artifactual character. It is not extended by an inner biological cognitive core but rather unfolds itself through objects and artifacts. Mind as such is, especially in our modern technological culture, shaped by virtue of and through technical artifacts. Recognizing this artifactual dimension of mind will, the author concludes, enable a more critical analysis of contemporary claims that ascribe certain original and irreducible features to thinking. (shrink)

The paper presents a comparative analysis between hermeneutics and ethnomethodology of science. A careful examination of the approaches suggested by the two programs not only demonstrates that a non-essentialist inquiry of scientific practices is possible, it also reveals how the significant methodological differences between these (post-phenomenological) programs inform divergent pictures of science’s practical rationality. The role these programs play in the debates on science’s cognitive autonomy is illuminated by spelling out the idea of the internal criticism of scientific research they (...) advance. In contrast to the external criticism of social epistemologists, the internal one does not aim at a deconstruction of science’s cognitive autonomy. Its task is to promote the epistemic emancipation of scientific communities by stressing the reflexive dimension of scientific research. (shrink)

In this contribution, I refer to a discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom on the latter’s normative pragmatics as advanced in Making it Explicit. Parting with Habermas, I intend to show that though both normative pragmatics and formal pragmatics postulate similar discursive ideals, the former, as compared with the latter, is not a particularly well-calibrated critical tool. I argue that whereas Brandom focuses on making conceptual norms explicit, and takes mutual recognition among participants to a linguistic practice for granted, (...) Habermas proposes a universal frame of reference, which delineates what should be taken as a paradigm case of perception and action, and thus a normative standard according to which all kinds of human endeavors can be judged. Thus construed, the formal frame of reference points to possible perceptual distortions along any of the three dimensions: the subjective, social, and objective worlds. (shrink)

This essay addresses the increasing prominence of ‘performance’ as an analytical frame in recent studies of science. Building on the insights of existing feminist criticism, it identifies two largely unacknowledged features of such performance-oriented studies: first, an implicit recuperation of a pre-discursively real body; and second, a persistent emphasis on the productive character of performances. The essay considers the limitations of these two themes, and concludes by exploring pathways suggested by other theoretical traditions.