This article elaborates a conceptual framework to systematize the epistemic evaluation of social systems. This framework can be used to structure an evaluation or to characterize and assess existing ones. The article then uses the framework to assess four representative evaluations of think tanks. This meta-evaluation exemplifies how the framework can play its structuring role. It also leads us to general conclusions about the existing evaluations of think tanks. Most importantly, by focusing on the organizational level, existing evaluations miss factors (...) that are situated at the network and ecosystemic levels and that significantly determine how well think tanks serve society in producing and disseminating knowledge relevant to public policy. This conclusion suggests the need for epistemic evaluations of think tank ecosystems. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the value of philosophy of science for history of science. I start by introducing a distinction between two ways of integrating history and philosophy of science: historical philosophy of science and philosophical history of science. I then offer a critical discussion of Imre Lakatos’s project to bring philosophy of science to bear on historical interpretation. I point out certain flaws in Lakatos’s project, which I consider indicative of what went wrong with PHS in the past. (...) Finally, I put forward my own attempt to bring out the historiographical potential of philosophy of science. Starting from Norwood Russell Hanson’s insight that historical studies of science involve metascientific concepts, I argue that philosophical reflection on those concepts can be historiographically fruitful. I focus on four issues and discuss their significance and utility for historiographical practice. (shrink)

Several scholars observed that narratives about the human past are evaluated comparatively. Few attempts have been made, however, to explore how such evaluations are actually done. Here I look at a lengthy “contest” among several historiographic narratives, all constructed to make sense of another one—the biblical story of the conquest of Canaan. I conclude that the preference of such narratives can be construed as a rational choice. In particular, an easily comprehensible and emotionally evocative narrative will give way to a (...) complex and mundane one, when the latter provides a more coherent account of the consensually accepted body of evidence. This points to a fundamental difference between historiographic narratives and fiction, contrary to some influential opinions in the philosophy of historiography. Such historiographic narratives have similarities with hypotheses and narrative explanations in natural science. (shrink)

The project of integrated HPS has occupied philosophers of science in one form or another since at least the 1960s. Yet, despite this substantial interest in bringing together philosophical and historical reflections on the nature of science, history of science and formal philosophy of science remain as divided as ever. In this paper, I will argue that the continuing separation between historical and formal philosophy of science is ill-founded. I will argue for this in both abstract and concrete terms. At (...) the abstract level, I reconstruct two possible arguments for the incompatibility of historical and formal philosophy of science and argue that they are both wanting. At the concrete level, I discuss how historical and formal philosophy of science have been brought together in practice, namely: in the form of a largely forgotten research tradition that I will refer to here as the study of formalized macro-units. After a brief exposition, I argue that this research tradition has been unduly overlooked by historically minded philosophers of science. Bringing together these observations, I argue that the divide between historical and formal philosophy of science is not grounded in any substantive arguments, but can be primarily attributed to disciplinary happenstance. (shrink)

One reason for the popularity of Craver’s mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance is that it seems to make good sense of the experimental practices and constitutive reasoning in the life sciences. Two recent papers propose a theoretical alternative to in light of several important conceptual objections. Their alternative approach, the no de-coupling account, conceives of constitution as a dependence relation that once postulated provides the best explanation of the impossibility of breaking the common cause coupling of a macro-level mechanism (...) and its micro-level components. This entails an abductive view of constitutive inference. Proponents of the NDC or abductive account recognize that their discussion leaves open a big question concerning the practical dimension of the notion of constitutive relevanssssce: Is it possible to faithfully reconstruct constitutional reasoning in science in terms of a failure to de-couple, via interlevel experiments, phenomena from their mechanistic constituents? Focusing on the field of memory and long-term potential research, this article argues that the abductive account provides a more adequate description of interlevel experiments in neuroscience. We also suggest that the account highlights some significant practical recommendations of how to interpret the findings of interlevel experiments. 1Introduction 2Mutual Manipulability and Constitutive Relevance 2.1Constitutive relevance through an interventionist lens 2.2Mutual manipulability: A methodological application 3Trouble for the Mutual Manipulability Account 4The Abductive Account of Constitution 5The Abductive Account: A Methodological Application 5.1Long-term potential and memory experiments 5.2A comparative summary 6Conclusions. (shrink)

Philosophers use historical case studies to support wide-ranging claims about science. This practice is often criticized as problematic. In this paper we suggest that the function of case studies can be understood and justified by analogy to a well-established practice in biology: the investigation of model organisms. We argue that inferences based on case studies are no more problematic than inferences from model organisms to larger classes of organisms in biology. We demonstrate our view in detail by reference to a (...) case study with a long history: Semmelweis’s discovery of the cause of childbed fever. (shrink)

In recent years, the use of historical cases in philosophy of science has become a proper topic of reflection. In this article I will contribute to this research by means of a discussion of one very famous example of case-based philosophy of science, namely the debate on the London & London model of superconductivity between Cartwright, Suárez and Shomar on the one hand, and French, Ladyman, Bueno and Da Costa on the other. This debate has been going on for years, (...) without any satisfactory resolution. I will argue here that this is because both sides impose on the historical case a particular philosophical conception of scientific representation that does not do justice to the historical facts. Both sides assume, more specifically, that the case concerns the discovery of a representational connection between a given experimental insight – the Meissner effect – and the diamagnetic meaning of London and London’s new equations of superconductivity. I will show, however, that at the time of the Londons’ publication, neither the experimental insight nor the meaning of the new equations was established: both were open for discussion and they were stabilized only later. On the basis of this historical discussion, I will then propose an alternative approach to the case study: the case should not be seen as a site of confrontation between pre-existing philosophical accounts, but rather as a way to historically elaborate and develop philosophical concepts. I will then show how approaching the historical episode in this way suggests an alternative approach to the philosophical study of representation, according to which it involves the establishment, over time, of a stable connection between constellations of different elements that, through discussion and engagement with alternative views and approaches, come to constitute phenomenon and meaning. (shrink)