Philip Kitcher's Advancement of science: a review article∗

Abstract

Why should an economist have anything especially pertinent or interesting to say about Philip Kitcher's new book on the philosophy of scienceAdvancement of science(1993)? If you read it, the first question that will surely pop to mind is, why do eminent philosophers of science (who once could not spare the time of day for the social sciences) now feel impelled to aspire to the status of social theorist, and in this particular case, to explicitly appropriate neoclassical economic theory in order to buttress the case that science is ‘progressive’? While some reviewers have registered their bemusement at this curious turn of events (Hacking, 1994; Fuller, 1994), no one has yet adequately been able to diagnose this symptom of recent convulsions in science studies, I will argue, because of lack of recourse to the economics side of the story. Once all branches of the lineage trees of the disciplines of philosophy of science, social studies of scientific knowledge (SSK) and economics are sketched in, it then bec...