(This insularity was further promoted by the guileless duplicity of scholars in other fields, who were all too prepared to bequeath "the problem of ...

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Historians must have an understanding of the present both to reconstruct the past and to explain that reconstruction to a contemporary audience. One criticism of presentism is that it is an interpretation of the past in terms of current values and ideas, and fails to provide a complete picture of the historical context. Regardless of such practices, however, the historian is limited to the methodological and archival tools available during his own time. Meaning, reason, and truth are different for different (...) periods and peoples. The clarity of his language, the consistency of his logic, and the validity of his proofs are relative to the historian's time and culture. The act of historical inquiry is influenced by the contrasts between past and present. Only by consciously addressing his dependence on the present can the historian adequately understand the past. (shrink)

Davidson attacks the intelligibility of conceptual relativism, i.e. of truth relative to a conceptual scheme. He defines the notion of a conceptual scheme as something ordering, organizing, and rendering intelligible empirical content, and calls the position that employs both notions scheme-content dualism. He argues that such dualism is untenable since: not only can we not parcel out empirical content sentence per sentence but also the notion of uninterpreted content to which several schemes are relative, and the related notion of a (...) theory ”fitting the evidence’, can be shown to lack intelligibility too. Davidson argues further that belief in incommensurable schemes or non-intertranslatable languages is possible only on violating a correct understanding of interpretability : if we succeed in interpreting someone else then we have shown there is no need to speak of two conceptual schemes, while if we fail ”there is no ground for speaking of two.’. (shrink)

The sociological dimension of science is studied using the discovery of the Wasserman reaction and its accidental application as a test for syphilis as a basis, ...

C'est bien à la croisée des chemins que doit se placer l'épistémologue, entre le réalisme et le rationalisme. C'est là qu'il peut saisir le nouveau dynamisme de ces philosophies contraires, le double mouvement par lequel la science simplifie le réel et complique la raison. Le trajet est alors écourté qui va de la réalité expliquée à la réalité appliquée. C'est dans ce court trajet qu'on doit développer toute la pédagogie de la preuve, pédagogie qui est la seule psychologie possible de (...) l'esprit scientifique. (shrink)

THE PROBLEM OP KNOWLEDGE l CONCEPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE An immediate difficulty which faces any discussion of the present kind is that there are so many ...

The doctrine of simple individuals has its equal and opposite reaction in the view that an individual is simply a bundle of properties, that the identity of an individual is entirely dependent on the identity of its properties. This view also seems to me to be in some sense wrong and I shall attack it in passing. If all my remarks have seemed excessively polemical it is because I have been anxious to make it as clear as possible what the (...) motivation behind this paper is. I am mainly concerned with the problem concerning the "it" which underlies or has properties and I shall want to argue that the identity of an individual--what it is that makes an individual that individual--does not depend merely on its being that individual or having that piece of substratum, but it depends partially and in a complicated way on the identity of its properties. The analysis will have to exhibit the nature of that dependence. Most of the discussion will revolve around proper names and their function since it is through linguistic considerations, I think, that we get the clearest illumination. The result, in case any one is interested, will be Absolute Idealism, or something like it. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that the history of science is, in some significant sense, rational and thus that historical episodes may serve as evidence in choosing between competing normative methodologies of science, the question arises: "Just what is this history-methodology evidential relation?" After examining the proposals of Laudan, a more plausible account is proposed.