On the Historicity of Scientific Objects

Abstract

The historical variation of scientific knowledge has lent itself to the development of historical epistemology, which attempts to historicize the origin and establishment of knowledge claims. The questions I address in this paper revolve around the historicity of the objects of those claims: How and why do new scientific objects appear? What exactly comes into being in such cases? Do scientific objects evolve over time and in what ways? I put forward and defend two theses: First, the ontology of science is so rich and variegated that there are no universally valid answers to these questions. Second, we need a pluralist account of scientific objects, a pluralist metaphysics that can do justice to their rich diversity and their various modes of being and becoming. I then focus on hidden objects, which are supposed to be part of the permanent furniture of the universe, and I discuss their birth and historicity: They emerge when various phenomena coalesce as manifestations of a single hidden cause and their representations change over time. Finally, I examine the conditions under which an evolving representation may still refer to the same object and I illustrate my argument drawing upon the early history of electrons. Knowledge claims, as well as the methods and practices that give rise to them, have changed over time. Historians and philosophers of science have amply documented the historicity of epistemic practices. Forms of explanation and argumentation, methods for acquiring knowledge, epistemic categories and values have been shown to vary considerably over time. Think, for instance, of the shift from the teleological explanations favored by Aristotelian natural philosophy to the mechanical explanations espoused by seventeenth-century natural philosophers; or of the transition from the ancient ideal of certain knowledge, based on apodeictic