Comments on the Precarious Relationship between History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The four papers in this issue illustrate both the extent of mutual entanglement between history of science and philosophy of science and the difaculty of achieving consensus on how the interchange between history of science and philosophy of science should work. They reveal some of the tensions between the aims and interests typical of historians and philosophers, tensions that often make exchanges like these unproductive. To overcome this problem, it is important to set the contexts and perhaps even the ground rules of collaboration so that the legitimate tensions involved are put to creative use. In order to make better sense of this suggestion, I address what was accomplished, and what was not, by the papers in this issue. To begin, consider the differences in the aims of philosophy and history. A few stereotypical generalities are useful here, though the stereotypes need to be treated skeptically. Philosophical investigation tends to focus on abstract questions, formulated sharply in terms of larger philosophical issues and views. When philosophers turn to particular historical materials or case studies, they often begin with pre-established concepts and sometimes with expected conclusions in mind. The concepts employed often contain presuppositions about the nature of theory, evidence, and explanation, about the relation of experiment to theory, the objectivity and intellectual autonomy of scientiac work, and the like. For this reason, philosophers working with historical materials risk overriding or misunderstanding the categories of the scientists whose work they study, especially when that work is historically or conceptually distant. To avoid the resultant traps, it is crucial to enforce close attention to the context of the work under investigation, to the categories, concepts, and aims of the historical protagonists, and to key features of the contexts