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Ernst Cassirer’s Legacy: History of Philosophy and History of Science

The paper is devoted to an overview of Cassirer’s work both as historian of philosophy and historian of science. Indeed, the “intelletcual cooperation” between history of philosophy and history of science represents an essential feature of Cassirer’s style of philosophizing: while the roots of a wide exploration stretching from Renaissance thought to modern physics go back to the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, the results of a similar cross-fertilization of research fields have deeply contributed to shaping new standards of inquiry. Cassirer’s relationship with the Warburg milieu in Hamburg and late in his life with the American intellectual scenario (for instance, with the “Journal of History of Ideas”) are surely worthy of closer investigation. Distinguished scholars such as Meyerson, Brunschvicg, Burtt, Koyré, Metzger, Lovejoy, Kristeller, have disussed, appreciated, critizised Cassirer’s still today fascinating studies devoted to Pico della Mirandola, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, to mention but a few. To explore some of these aspects focusing both on affinities and differences within a cosmpolitian intellectual community can provide a better understanding of philosophy and history of science in the first half of 20th century. Cassirer’s legacy requires, therefore, a new assessment.

1 History of Philosophy and History of Science: An “Intellectual Cooperation”

In 1936, introducing a collection of essays presented to Ernst Cassirer on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Raymond Klibansky and Herbert James Paton wrote:

Philosophy and history are the two main activities to which Professor Cassirer has devoted his life. In his work the union of these activities is achieved, not merely postulated as an ideal; and this union is to be found alike when, as an historian of philosophy, he is retracing the development of the theory of knowledge and when, as a creative and systematic thinker, he offers us his doctrine of civilization in “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” ( Klibansky and Paton 1936 , p. VII).

These remarks clearly summarize Cassirer’s style of philosophizing. Throughout his intellectual life Cassirer was a great historian of philosophy as well as of science, still remaining, however, a philosopher engaged in the systematic inquiry into the structure of both knowledge and human cultural forms. More precisely, the peculiarity of Cassirer’s conception of philosophy rests, first of all, on the intimate link he established from the early days of his career between the history of science and the history of philosophy, which Cassirer considered as illuminating each other in a sort of hermeneutical circle. Such a presupposition was the permanent framework of Cassirer’s whole historical work, since the very beginnings until the later activity at the time of his exile.

Already in his juvenile book on Leibniz (published in 1902) Cassirer had investigated the “systems” of Descartes and Leibniz in their close connection with the rise of modern geometry, natural philosophy, infinitesimal calculus and dynamics, which represent the very roots of the metaphysics both had built up on “scientific foundations”. [1] Later on, in his monumental work on the Problem of Knowledge in modern science and philosophy (first edition 1906–1907), Cassirer carried out a comprehensive reconstruction of the problem of knowledge in modern times founded, broadly speaking, on a theoretical point of view. To be sure, this was the result of Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian apprenticeship and, at the same time, the highest proof of his very original approach to epistemological reflection on the scientific Faktum (according to the terminology of the Marburg School). Indeed, the transcendental method deals with this Faktum in order to find out the conditions of possibility of scientific experience in a Kantian sense, albeit in an unorthodox way. This is the major assumption lying at the core of Hermann Cohen’s own reading of Kant’s theory of knowledge, first carried out in his seminal 1871 book Kant’s Theory of Experience . [2] In Cohen’s view Kant’s transcendental inquiry into the a priori structure of knowledge rests just on the Faktum of the mathematical science of nature; and this “fact”, as Cohen suggests, is both historically determined and steadily changing, requiring therefore an ongoing analysis which uncovers the conditions of its possibility ( Cohen 1987a , p. 208). As Cohen would later say, the articulation of a priori synthetic principles refers thus to the “developing fact ( Werdefaktum ) of mathematical natural science” ( Cohen 1977 , p. 76), although Cohen actually only deals with infinitesimal calculus, but refers rather in a very general, not to say metaphorical, way, to Newtonian physics as a starting-point of Kant’s theory of scientific knowledge ( Cohen 1987b , p. 94).

For his part, Cassirer goes beyond Cohen by transforming Cohen’s account of factum of science in a radically dynamic way, due to his careful reconstruction of mathematics and mathematical science of nature from its very beginning in 17th century up to contemporary theories of both relativity and quantum mechanics. [3] Within the tradition of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, it was also Cassirer who first adequately tackled the historical and mutable dimension of the historical dynamics of science in depth, giving at the same time an original account of relativized a priori functions of scientific knowledge as a set of “invariants of experience” ( Cassirer 1923 , p. 269). For Cassirer the “fact” of science is a “historically developing ‘fact’” ( Cassirer 1995 , vol. 1, p. 14), never concluded nor bound to a definitive stage of scientific knowledge. Unlike Kant’s account of human reason, categories are no longer “ fixed ‘core concepts of reason’ in both number and content” ( Cassirer 1995 , vol. 1, p. 15), but rather represent the ‘open’ system of a priori conditions founding science in its ongoing development. Accordingly, Cassirer deals with a kind of ‘history of pure reason’ in the Kantian sense, which – as he emphasizes – is based on the strict collaboration between epistemological standpoint and historical investigation ( Cassirer 1995 , vol. 1, p. VII). Above all, however, Cassirer continued the ambitious project laid out by a young Natorp in his early book on Descartes’ theory of knowledge ( Natorp 1882a ), namely to outline the prehistory ( Vorgeschichte ) of Kant’s critical philosophy through a philosophical and historical examination of its sources in the philosophy and scientific thought of Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz, the founders of the idealistic tradition (in the sense of the ‘logical idealism’ of the Marburg school), whose origins Cohen, and later Natorp himself, saw in Plato’s theory of ideas. Insofar as it is plausible to speak of a Neo-Kantian tradition in the history of science in the first decades of the 20th century, Cassirer is surely both its most representative interpreter and its first promoter.

According to Cassirer, the traditional history of philosophy has rather neglected, for the most part, the essential ways in which the rise of modern science contributed to the deep changes that occurred in philosophy. Indeed, in the early modern age, scientists and philosophers worked together in shaping a new image of nature, which also entailed a radical distance from the previous conception of both man and culture dominating medieval thought. Cassirer’s main methodological assumption is that science and philosophy must be mutually connected: modern philosophy and modern science constitute a unique whole and, as a consequence, the understanding of the problem of knowledge must consider on the same level both philosophers, such as Descartes or Leibniz, and scientists, such as Galileo, Kepler or Newton. It is impossible – Cassirer argues – to grasp the intellectual progress of modern philosophy without any reference to contemporary development of science ( Cassirer 1995 , vol. 1, p. 10). Only exact science provides a reliable account of the concept of knowledge, upon which philosophy has to rest if it intends to go beyond the pure “rhyme of opinions” Hegel spoke of ( Cassirer 1995 , vol. 1, pp. 17–18). The relationship between science and philosophy is an intimated one, in no way a purely exterior liaison .

Now it is important here is to stress that Cassirer again and again based his historical work on these both methodological and systematic presuppositions. One of the clearer reflections about this crucial aspect can be found in the lecture Cassirer held in 1935 at the Bedford College in London, whose manuscript has been published very recently. [4] By opening his lecture, Cassirer made a plea to the “intellectual cooperation” between science and philosophy ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 90). He believed that it would be a failure for our modern culture to separate “the field of philosophical, of merely speculative thought from the field of scientific thought” ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 89). By contrast, their “indissoluble unity” is a very postulate of both modern philosophy and “universal history of ideas”. As Cassirer clearly suggests:

In this field we cannot draw any sharp line of demarcation between what is contained in philosophical and in scientific thought, between what is brought to light by philosophical reflection and by scientific observation and deduction […] Thinkers of very different schools agree with each other in admitting the truth and the necessity of this postulate. Hence, it becomes obvious that the study of the relations between philosophical and scientific thought in the first centuries of modern philosophy has in itself not only an historical but also a systematic importance ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 89)

Cassirer’s “postulate” has, indeed, two faces. On the one hand, the “systematic importance” Cassirer spoke of is the main point of his conception of modern science insofar as it always involves “theoretical presuppositions”. For according to Cassirer, Galilei’s Dynamics already shows very well the “interdependence” subsisting between facts and theories, or – broadly speaking – between science and philosophical insights (for instance, regarding the idea of natural law) ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 60). Furthermore, we can say that the “revolution” in the way of thinking announced by Kant is confirmed by scrutinizing the history of science, which testifies the radical change that occurred with the rise of modern science, to say the passage from the “general form of a teleological science of Nature”, basically supported by Aristotle and Aristotelianism, to the “general form of a mathematical science of nature” ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 102). In our contemporary language, Cassirer’s statement seems to recall the shift of paradigms that Thomas Kuhn would famously describe in his major book on the structure of scientific revolutions ( Kuhn 1970 ). Yet, no less ‘modern’ is what Cassirer claims in the following, as he emphasizes the very task, and the ultimate goal, of historical inquiry in this field:

Both the historians of modern philosophy and the historians of science have often fallen short of a thorough description and explanation of the problems they were concerned with by restricting themselves in a too narrow sense to such limits as seemed to be prescribed by the traditional division of their labours. Helpful and indispensable as this division may be in many respects, it must not prevent us from recognizing the manifold and very subtle connections between the different branches of knowledge ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 113).

In order to overcome a similar “traditional division”, Cassirer calls attention to a core methodological question he defined as the “triple method of investigation” ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 171). Historian of philosophy, he affirms, can take into account three modalities in carrying out the history of thought. First, they can apply a purely empirical, pragmatical method aiming to collect ‘facts’ and organize them in chronological order (a kind of ‘antiquarian history’, as Nietzsche would say). Major historians of philosophy in the 18th century such as Brucker or Tenneman offered this very type of detailed descriptions. Secondly, a radical change occurred as Hegel proposed a new model of the history of philosophy, based on the “intersection” between the pragmatical method and the logical-dialectic method. Despite the great merits Hegel has acquired and the “undeniable fertility” of his work, it seems doubtless, for Cassirer, that Hegel’s conception of history of philosophy “is exposed to grave objections” and even leads to a “disfigurement” of it ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 177). Finally, the very solution to this dilemma consists of adopting a new method in both the history of philosophy and the history of science, namely by providing a “bilateral not a unilateral relation”, a “mutual dependence” between “facts and concepts” ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 178). This kind of “dependence” involves that we certainly have to employ conceptual frameworks in order to give account of what seems, at first glance, to pertain only to ‘historical’ level. But conceptual assumptions or epistemological views (for instance, what characterizes scientific theories compared to mythical or religious beliefs?) are at once the result of the development of science, in particular since the scientific revolution in 17th century. In Cassirer’s mind it is thus important to maintain that “concepts and principles are not a ready-made mould of thought”, established beforehand and to which historical reality has to be adapted: “The facts must be understood according to principles; but the principles themselves must be formed in accordance with the fact” ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 178). This methodological stance is valid, for Cassirer, in the case of the history of science too. Given the fact that the history of science similarly needs such a similar “mutual dependence”, the crucial question is here just the “accordance” between two different “ways of thinking” carried out by science and philosophy respectively. In his London lecture Cassirer spells out his basic methodological assumption in a passage worth quoting at length because of its significance for all the work Cassirer has done in this field for many decades of intellectual activity:

We never come to a full understanding of the reciprocal influence of Science and Philosophy if we persist in including ourselves in the latter domain; if, for instance, for the period of the seventeenth century we follow the way from Descartes to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Leibniz, and so on. To grasp the real movement of thought , in this sphere of problems, we must, as it were, add a new dimension to this immanent description of the development of speculative philosophy. Instead of regarding the thought of Hobbes as a simple continuation of the thought of Bacon, we have to refer and attach it to the thought of Galileo; instead of comparing Leibniz with Descartes or Spinoza we have to compare him with Newton ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 180, italics added).

2 Cassirer’s Pioneering Work and the Question of Scientific Revolution

Cassirer’s contribution to the development of the history of science in the first half of 20th century is surely worth closer exploration, especially since his role was not adequately acknowledged until recent times. Today the historical narrative should be, by contrast, quite different, urging a new assessment of Cassirer’s immense work beyond some commonplaces still accepted by scholarship. Even influential students have sometimes reduced his historical works to standard handbooks providing a general account of turning points in history of philosophy, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Furthermore, many interpreters of Cassirer have mainly overlooked the Neo-Kantian framework constituting the permanent backdrop against which Cassirer as a historian has to be located. Along his whole career, Cassirer was oriented by a systematic point of view in doing history of thought, in a way quite similar to the Problemgeschichte constituting one of the most influential approach to history of philosophy in Germany in the age of Neo-Kantianism. Once this essential aspect is missed, one cannot wonder whether Cassirer’s fortune (or misfortune) has been in great part conditioned by reading him in terms of a brilliant historian of ideas meritoriously close, to a great extent, to recent results and methodological suggestions of contemporary scholarship (especially in the United States), but unfortunately still committed to German “systematic” philosophy imbued with Kantian Apriorism. To quote a major protagonist of the history and philosophy of science after the Second World War, one could recall here what Thomas Kuhn said very briefly about Cassirer, as he noted that Cassirer had exerted a significant influence on the subsequent history of science in spite of his “profound […] limitations” ( Kuhn 1977 , pp. 108, 149). No wonder, either, if Kuhn, in the preface to his magnum opus , recalled gratefully as his teachers Meyerson, Koyré, Anneliese Maier, Hélène Metzger, and Arthur O. Lovejoy, namely historians who, as Kuhn indicates, were not influenced by Kantianism or Neo-Kantianism as in the case of Cassirer (who is not actually remembered by Kuhn in this passage) ( Kuhn 1970 , p. vi).

At any rate, it would be difficult to deny that Cassirer has offered a pioneering work in matters of the history of science and the history of scientific ideas. Already Edwin Arthur Burtt recognized, in the introduction to his ground-breaking 1924 book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science , the great outcome of Cassirer’s contribution to recent history of science: “Professor Cassirer […] has done work on modern epistemology which will long remain a monumental achievement”, although – as Burtt added – “a much more radical historical analysis needs to be made” ( Burtt 1954 , p. 29). This kind of appreciation, enthusiastic but partly negative, mainly characterizes the reception of Cassirer’s “monumental” studies among contemporary scholars. This aspect is particularly evident as we regard the French milieu , where Cassirer was early on acknowledged for having presented the inseparable connection between the history of philosophy and the history of scientific thought, especially as it was exhibited in the first two volumes of the Problem of Knowledge .

The review Émile Meyerson published thereof in 1911 testifies to such a reception of Cassirer. Meyerson praised the enormous achievement of Cassirer’s masterful work as a large, careful historical reconstruction of modern science. Moreover, Meyerson remarked that Cassirer’s excellent book was the outcome of an “immense knowledge” ( immense savoir ), which included not only the history of philosophy, but also the history of science with its many different aspects and topics. So, in Meyerson’s opinion, Cassirer’s contribution represented both a great novelty and a veritable model for scholarship devoted to analyzing scientific thought from a historical standpoint, a standpoint – we might add – which at the time was not so familiar to philosophers or historians of philosophy as it is today. Nonetheless, Meyerson stressed that Cassirer’s own way to carry out a similar great project rested, despite the impressive historical analysis he had performed, on the primacy attributed to the “systematic point of view”. According to Meyerson, Cassirer’s book was a historical one only at first sight, being rather a “systematic”, all-encompassing reconstruction resting on a “theory that the author attempts to substantiate through the inquiry into the scientific and philosophical development in modern times” ( Meyerson 1911 , p. 100). Moreover, Meyerson contended, quite differently from Cassirer, the independence of “objective reality” from any epistemological framework; in his mind the permanent connection between epistemology and ontology was the missing aspect of Cassirer’s conception of science and represented, in full opposition to Cassirer, the essential assumption on which science relies ( Meyerson 1911 , p. 129; see also Meyerson 1951 , pp. 439, 491).

We have to add that at the same time as his review of Cassirer’s book Meyerson gave in Paris a lecture devoted to contemporary philosophy of science in Germany. Here he referred again to Cassirer’s Problem of Knowledge , remarking some affinities with Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism as well as with Kurd Lasswitz’s History of Atomic Theories . Echoing Cassirer’s orientation, Meyerson argued that

the prior condition [of philosophy of science] is, obviously beside the unavoidable philosophical culture, a proper knowledge of contemporary science. But that knowledge is by no means enough. It must rather be connected with an investigation of the science of the past […]. The basis of philosophy of science is the history of science ( Meyerson 2011 , p. 193, italics added).

Meyerson’s stance testifies therefore that at the beginning of 20th century French philosophy of science – only recently acknowledged as a very original kind of “historical philosophy of science” ( Bitbol and Gayon 2006 ; Chimisso 2008 ) – was seduced by Cassirer’s work. This also the case of Léon Brunschvicg, who manifested in that period a great interest in Cassirer’s both theoretical and historical work. In particular, in his unmatched history of mathematical philosophy published in 1912, Léon Brunschvicg repeatedly referred to Cassirer’s Problem of Knowledge , while also endorsing his plea for a historical analysis of mathematical and scientific thought based on what Brunschvicg called “the historical method” ( Brunschvicg 1912 , p. 3). According to Brunschvicg at issue is a view of scientific knowledge resting, precisely as in Cassirer’s view, on its intrinsic historical dynamics. Sharing a perspective not different from Cassirer’s, and to some extent converging with the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, Brunschvicg was convinced that science represents an historical given (a factum , as the Neo-Kantians would say), which has to be inquired in order to discover its conditions of possibility. Science – Brunschvicg argued – “is given ( donnée ) to the philosophical reflection” ( Brunschvicg 1905 , p. 109). Following this assumption, Brunschvicg would affirm that history offers to the philosopher “a double service”: on the one hand, it permits to explain the present situation of science through the past; on the other hand, the historical perspective allows epistemological inquiry to go beyond “the crystalized forms of the past”, assuring thereby that scientific innovation should not be imprisoned in an unchangeable set of universal categories ( Brunschvicg 1922 , p. 458).

No wonder, thus, that in 1936 Bruschvicg contributed to the Festschrift in honour of Cassirer delivering a paper highlighting the necessary relationship between history and philosophy. The major issue of this essay is the new consciousness, emerging in particular during the 20th century, that science has assumed a “historical form”, going beyond the knowledge of eternal laws considered for a long time as the veritable and only possible form of knowledge. Essential changes in exact sciences (probability calculus, thermodynamics, theory of relativity) took, at the turn of the 20th century, “the form of a history” ( Brunschvicg 1936 , p. 32). At stake here is not a vague historicism, but the pivotal role assumed by time (irreversibility processes in thermodynamics, space-time in Einstein’s theory of relativity) in shaping what Brunschvicg calls ”a revolution in the very manner in which the problem of time is presented to us” ( Brunschvicg 1936 , p. 29). As a consequence of this “scientific revolution achieved in our times”, the “superstition” of a priori firmly embodied in human reason has “threatened to reduce to impotence the admirable work of Kantian philosophy” ( Brunschvicg 1936 , p. 33). History, therefore, is no longer a mere appendix to knowledge, but rather an intrinsic, immanent feature of scientific thought; for Brunschvicg, very similarly to Cassirer, this perspective is essentially tied to a “philosophy of the human mind” that opens the domain of reason to continual historical development which philosophy, in turn, can grasp according to its resources ( Brunschvicg 1936 , p. 34).

In the 1920s both Meyerson and Brunschvicg were at the crossroads of a new phase in the history and philosophy of science in France. A long story had led to this important turning point. Historians such as Paul Tannery, Gaston Milhaud and, first of all, Pierre Duhem, had opened the path to a new phase in history of science. All these scholars were well known to Cassirer, who would discuss, in particular, Duhem’s account of the evolution of both cosmology and physics from ancient to modern ages (as we shall see below). Quite an interesting case is, in this context, Helène Metzger, whose activity in this field is characterized by a kind of, as it were, new professionalization in scrutinizing sources, documents, fringe contributions, experiments and rudimentary laboratories (for instance concerning the rise of modern chemistry), without abandoning, nonetheless, the philosophical framework enabling one to order such different material according to some rules of interpretation. Metzger spoke thus of “multiple a priori ” enlarging and modifying a supposed unique a priori as the universal condition of scientific knowledge ( Metzger 1987 , p. 46), and she posed thereby the question concerning the role of philosophical method in practicing the history of science ( Metzger 1987 , pp. 57–73). Whereas the former aspect signalizes a methodological approach quite different from Cassirer’s one, the latter testifies to a converging agenda regarding the philosophical horizon within which, and unlike the attitude of most historians of positivistic orientation, the history of science ought to find its epistemological justification ( Chimisso 2019 , pp. 92–112).

Yet the most important point of intersection between Cassirer and his French colleagues engaged in the history of science is Alexandre Koyré, who was, for his part, an admirer of Cassirer’s Problem of knowledge . Even though there are significant differences between them concerning in particular the question of Galileo’s Platonism, in his Études galiléennes Koyré recognized Cassirer’s great accomplishment in having acknowledged (along with Brunschvicg and Meyerson, among others) both the extraordinary importance of the modern Scientific Revolution and its relevance for philosophy ( Koyré 1966 , p. 11). Cassirer’s and Koyre’s parallel adventures in promoting new standards and innovative conceptions in the history of science surely deserve a closer investigation. The point to stress here is, at least, that of their diverging strategies in performing the history of modern science or, put in more precise words, of the scientific revolution. According to Koyré, this decisive break in the history of Western civilization occurred when the “scientific and philosophical revolution” destroyed the Greek and Medieval image of the cosmos, to say of a finite and qualitatively ordered universe, replacing it with both an infinite world and the homogenous space of geometry (“geometrization of space”, as Koyré famously stated) ( Koyré 1943 , p. 404; Koyré 1957 , pp. 2–3). This “complicated story”, as Koyré calls it, is the very origin of his extraordinary work in exploring Galileian and Newtonian science too, though starting from quite a different point from Cassirer’s one, Cassirer being not very interested in the cosmological problems, grounding by contrast the veritable modern scientific revolution in Koyre’s account. [5] This difference, which would require a more in-depth, specific analysis, is not the only one. On the one hand, and unlike Cassirer, Koyré tries to capture the inner process of the growth of scientific thought “by comprehending its development – as he said in 1951 – in the course of its own creative activity”, employing thereby a method of scrupulous reading of the texts aiming at ‘deconstructing’ them in search of conceptual tensions, unconscious premises or misleading hypotheses ( Koyré 1973 , p. 14). On the other hand, Koyré is not committed to a Kantian way of thinking and it is not by chance that he was deeply influenced by Meyerson, as has been rightly suggested by recent scholarship (see Bensaude-Vincent 2016 ). For Koyré, scientific thought must be illuminated by considering, on the one hand, its intrinsic conceptual instrumentation and, on the other hand, physical reality as it is given in itself, without assuming a kind of transcendental subject that constitutes it according to his a priori forms. This explains why Koyré refuses Cassirer’s interpretation of Galilean Platonism, since Cassirer considers Plato – this is the questionable objection Koyré addressed to Cassirer – as if he were Kant. But to this point we shall come back later, since this confrontation would be developed more in depth in the years of the American exile of both.

Immediately before his emigration to the USA Cassirer was already acquainted, for his part, with the Études galiléennes , to which he refers explicitly in the article Mathematical Mystique and Mathematical Science of Nature . Here it is relevant that Cassirer, echoing likewise Koyré’s use of the term, deals with the concept revolution in science. In Cassirer’s own words:

The history of human knowledge repeatedly shows us new, particular ages (the more important ones, to be sure), in the course of which knowledge does not simply increase its extent as much as change both its overall conceptual tools and its sense. Instead of a mere quantitative growth, there suddenly appears a qualitative “change” ( Umschlag ). Rather than dealing with an evolution, we are dealing with an unexpected revolution . The very ideal of exact knowledge of nature arises from just such a revolution ( Cassirer 1940 , p. 285).

To be sure, “scientific revolution” had for many years been a concept already used by historians of science, at least by scholars with whom Cassirer was acquainted. For instance, Brunschvicg himself had spoken, in his contribution to the volume in homage to Cassirer, of the “scientific revolution achieved in our times” thanks to Einstein’s theory of relativity (see above). Furthermore, a clear definition (long before Kuhn’s celebrated formulation) of what a scientific revolution signifies can be found for instance in a passage by Helène Metzger suggesting that “[a] science undergoes a sudden revolution when, due to the discovery of a new and fertile point of view, the scientist’s mentality suddenly changes” ( Metzger 1987 , p. 38; Chimisso 2019 , p. 190).

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that for Cassirer a conceptual “revolution” does not signify a sudden break from the previous scientific age. On the contrary, Cassirer argues that it would be “misleading” to consider the rise of modern natural science as being totally independent from its medieval roots, since “we are never truly dealing with an interruption in the continuity” ( Cassirer 1940 , p. 285). Hence, both continuity and discontinuity are the two faces of scientific progress, although Cassirer does underline that the “jump” accomplished by scientific thought in the modern age would not have been possible in vacuo . In other words, Cassirer emphasizes that the only ‘great’ scientific revolution is the birth of mathematical science in 17th century. The divide between medieval science and modern science emerges through the systematic recourse to the mathematical language in order to decipher, as Galileo would say, the “book of nature”. More generally, this revolutionary aspect is strictly bound to the new “form of thinking” upon which modern science since Galileo rests ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 39). But, on the other hand, for Cassirer the origins of the scientific revolution are also rooted in the past, being no sudden break (or change of paradigms in a Kuhnian strict sense) actually conceivable.

Like Koyré, Cassirer puts consequently into question the usefulness of the concept of continuity as featured in Duhem’s historical account of the development of science from the Middle Ages to Galileo. While in his history of mechanics before Galilean science, Duhem meritoriously points out the undeniable importance of the theory of impetus , in Cassirer‘s judgement it is “audacious and doubtful” to place the prehistory Duhem is dealing with on the same level as the rise of the new science which represents, in Cassirer’s mind, an enormous change from a mathematical and empirical standpoint as well as the birth of a very different image of the universe ( Cassirer 1940 , p. 286). Cassirer’s way of contrasting Duhem’s thesis is also spelt out in his 1935 lecture in London, which we have already referred to. Cassirer has indeed no doubt that Duehm “has rendered a great service on behalf of the history of natural philosophy” offering thereby an indispensable contribution to the study of modern scientific thought ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 38). But Cassirer puts into question both the result of Duhem’s inquiry and the general assumption on which they rest. In Cassirer’s words:

[W]hat is no longer to be overlooked is the fact that the real distinction between medieval and modern thought, in the field of natural philosophy, is not to be sought in the subject-matter alone – which to a large extent is common to both – but in the form of thinking, in the categories used for the investigation of natural problems. It is a well-known phenomenon in the history of Physics that even the most original conceptions and theories do not owe their originality to the fact that they arise, as ready-made ideas, from the minds of individual thinkers in the same sense as Athena arose from the head of Jove. There is always a very long and a very intricate preparation of these ideas which preludes our regarding them as inventions in the strict sense of the word ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 39).

One example Cassirer mentions in this regard is Newton’s discovery of the universal law of gravitation as it depends on the laws of Kepler’s astronomy. In order to reach the final formulation of Newton’s law an intricate path had to be taken; namely it was necessary to assume a whole “system of presuppositions and inferences” further developing what had already been in the making since Galilei and Kepler: in other words, the emerging “intellectual revolution” thanks to which, as Kant would say, Physics has for the first time entered “on the secure path of science” ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 40; see also Cassirer 2020 , p. 14).

In short, it seems that Cassirer in the 1930s became more and more sensitive to contemporary topics in the history of science, though he still maintained that peculiar kind of Kantianism (or Neo-Kantianism) which permitted to him an understanding of modern science conciliating continuity and revolution, historical reconstructions and philosophical insights sub specie relativized a priori or, to quote Helène Metzger, multiple a priori . This was the conceptual baggage Cassirer brought along as he moved to United Sates.

3 The Late Cassirer: Between Germany and the United States

Because of his acknowledged reputation as a historian of scientific changes, in the early 1940s Cassirer was indeed welcomed by the American community of historians of science and scientific ideas, which manifested a great regard for the several studies on the Renaissance, as well as on Leibniz, Newton, and Galileo, which Cassirer published in the years of his exile in the United States. More precisely, Cassirer’s own understanding of the history of philosophy in its connection with history of scientific ideas was highly appreciated by scholars plainly belonging to a different tradition, but very sensitive to the history of ideas as “cross-fertilization – according to Arthur O. Lovejoy’s claim – among the several fields of intellectual history” ( Lovejoy 1940 , p. 7). This was precisely the kind of historiography practiced by the Journal for the History of Ideas with which Cassirer intensively collaborated, nourishing in this way both the fruitful legacy and the influence of his own conception of historical inquiry. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to affirm that Cassirer in this late phase of his work has abandoned or strongly modified his previous approach to history of philosophy and science; but he was certainly deeply interested in the history of idea as ”cross-fertilization” pivoting on the “unit-ideas” Lovejoy had spoked of ( Lovejoy 1936 , pp. 3–23).

Before investigating this aspect of Cassirer’s late intellectual life, it still seems suitable to go back to the last days of his activity in Germany, namely to the golden years he spent in Hamburg. At that point he was engaging with the transformation – to quote his celebrated maxim – of the “critique of reason” into a “critique of culture”. Cassirer’s early influence on the history of science and philosophy had indeed increased in the 1920s, as he extended his former inquiry concerning the problem of knowledge into a wider cultural context, according to the perspective of his philosophy of culture focusing on the whole of symbolic forms. To be sure, a turning point is represented by Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (1927), certainly one of Cassirer’s most influential books. Individuum und Kosmos is a splendid work composed in connection with the milieu of the Warburg Library and influenced by the image of the Renaissance which Aby Warburg himself had elaborated in his fascinating analysis both of the rebirth of Paganism and of ancient astrological beliefs in the early 15th century. At the core of this celebrated book lies the wide context of symbolic forms (religion, art, mythical thought), which constitutes the cultural background enabling the rise of the modern scientific image of the universe, from Nicholas Cusano to Giordano Bruno. For Cassirer, a new sentiment of life as well as the increasing emancipation of natural science from the dark power of magic and astrology made it possible to conceive of nature in a new light, namely, as the object of mathematical measurement rather than something which could enjoy a purely qualitative approach. Accordingly, it is due to the rebirth of Platonism that Galilei’s new science could arise, being precisely Plato’s theory of knowledge as it is presented in the doctrine of anamnesis that represents “a red thread” throughout his work: the crucial point for mathematical science is indeed, and in a broader Platonic sense, the independence and spontaneity of the mind in organizing natural phenomena ( Cassirer 2000 , pp. 168–169). But at stake here is a peculiar reading of Platonism, for Galilei conceives of motion itself as an idea: “Taken as an object of knowledge – Cassirer argues – movement and even the material mass itself possess ideality. For in both, certain immutable characteristics can be shown which behave in the same way; and in both purely mathematical laws are demonstrable” ( Cassirer 2000 , p. 173). Such an interpretation still rests on the Neo-Kantian paradigm first established by Paul Natorp in his seminal essay on Galilei as philosopher , which surely constitutes the very origin of the Marburg history of modern science outlined under the signs of both mathematical Platonism and the Kantian “critique of knowledge” ( Natorp 1882b ). But Cassirer’s own appropriation of a similar epistemological line involves, beyond the epistemological aspects taken into account by Natorp, the placement of Galilei’s science within the history of modern culture as well. As Cassirer would affirm in a lecture delivered in 1932, Galilei’s revolution in science is the result of a more general turn in the “form of thinking” ( Denkform ), that can briefly defined as the quest for autonomy and independence of reason: this is properly the new impulse nourishing not only the rise of modern science, but the “whole history of European spirit” ( Cassirer 2020 , p. 33).

No doubt can subsist that, in spite of (or thanks to) its Neo-Kantian background, Individuum und Kosmos represents – as Kristeller and Randall Jr. would later emphasize – the most significant result of “the interest in Renaissance thought” since Wilhelm Dilthey’s pioneering work ( Kristeller and Randall 1941 , p. 455; see also Baron 1930/1931 , p. 113). Actually, the book rapidly became an ideal center of intellectual exchanges, first and foremost in Germany, but in the following years also abroad, for instance in Italy where Eugenio Garin was emerging as a scholar to some extent close to Cassirer, not to say of a cosmopolitan scholar such as Paul Oskar Kristeller living at the cross-road between Germany, Italy and the United States. [6] Along with some other scholars of Renaissance thought and arts, such as for instance Gertrud Bing, Edgard Wind and Maurice de Gandillac, it is particularly worth mentioning Klibansky because of his fundamental studies on the Platonic tradition in the Middle Ages, where one can still detect traces of Cassirer’s influence. [7] Klibansky had been, on the other hand, the editor of Carolus Bovillus’s Liber de sapientte published in the Appendix to Individuum und Kosmos along with the Cusano’s Liber de Mente edited by Joachim Ritter. [8] To be sure, Klibansky remained all his life indebted to Cassirer, as clearly emerges from his recollections ( Klibansky 1998 , pp. 32–43) and, in particular, from his contribution to the volume in homage to Cassirer clearly influenced by Cassirer’s conception of historical knowledge as interpretation of meanings that are not simply ‘given’ ( Klibansky 1936 ). But, above all, Klibansky would be later the co-author of Saturn and Melancholy , the famous and widely read book which is the outcome of a new, very enlarged edition of Fritz Saxl’s and Erwin Panofky’s Dürers „Melancholia , first appeared in 1923 ( Klibansky 1998 , pp. 149–165). This paramount contribution summarizes the main tenets of the Circle around Aby Warburg and can be considered, to a certain extent, an ideal complement of Cassirer’s Individuum und Kosmos : put in other words, a sort of “German way” in opening new paths to history of prescientific and scientific thought in the wide context of intellectual history.

That was, after all, a time of extraordinary intellectual excitement. The young generation of Cassirer’s scholars in Hamburg enjoyed a unique experience, not only in the field of history of philosophy, science, culture and arts. As Maurice de Gandillac later emphasized, the famous debate in Davos between Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in the spring of 1929 witnessed to a philosophical and a political climate deeply permeated by the opposition between Cassirer’s (and Brunschvicg’s) humanistic Enlightenment and Heidegger’s announcement of the final decline of Western metaphysics. For the young scholars that attended the dispute Cassirer was, despite some limits in his interpretation, the author of a magnificent book on Renaissance philosophy embodying full opposition to Heidegger’s anti-humanistic stance ( De Gandillac 1990 , pp. 17–19). As Klibansky would retrospectively suggest, the meeting in Davos was decisive for “the fate of German philosophy” ( Klibansky 1998 , p. 33–34); and this circumstance can also explain why the volume dedicated to Cassirer in 1936 could be considered as an “international document” testifying to a kind of “European solidarity” toward the exiled Cassirer ( Klibansky 1999 , p. 288). At that moment, the “world of yesterday” was tragically over.

In fact, Cassirer’s wide cultural influence in the last period of the Weimar Republic was brutally interrupted by the rise of Nazism. The question of his legacy in the aftermath of the escape from Germany is very intriguing, in particular with regard to Cassirer’s assimilation in non-German speaking countries. For this reason, it would be highly praiseworthy to undertake a closer investigation of Cassirer’s impact on the American milieu , in particular concerning his influential contributions about both the Renaissance and early modern science. A premise is still necessary: Cassirer never abandoned either his method of investigation, or the general philosophical standpoint from which he continued to explore the history of philosophy as well as of science from the 16th century onwards. Nonetheless, attention should be paid to the way in which Cassirer translates, so to speak, his own conception of the history of thought into the idiom of American scholarship, which was apparently less interested in systematic frameworks as well as in the Neo-Kantian background. This sort of translation mostly concerns Cassirer’s style of narrative but also reveals, as a consequence, a modified way of dealing with systematic questions, which do appear rather implicitly assumed than highlighted as in his previous German works.

Even in 1941 outstanding scholars such Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Radall jr. pointed out that the Neo-Kantianism lying at the core, in particular, of the Problem of Knowledge was surely “sometimes intrusive”, but it did not imply casting a shadow over “[Cassirer’s] contribution to intellectual history [which] is undoubtedly the most substantial made by any German in this generation” ( Kristeller and Randall 1941 , p. 456). Both fortune and misfortune of Cassirer in the last years of his life and thereafter are strictly tied to the reception of his more oriented historical works, although an encompassing view of his philosophy of culture was also available in the Essay on Man , the last systematic book published by Cassirer in his life ( Jürgens 2012 ). [9] After his death in April 1945 Cassirer was not, however, an intellectual destined to remain for many years exiled from philosophical landscape, as unfortunately happened in postwar Europe. When Cassirer abandoned his last European country, escaping from Sweden, he left there the German manuscript of the fourth volume of the Erkenntnisproblem (subtitled Von Hegels Tod bis zur Gegenwart ), which would be translated into English in 1950 by William Hoglom and Charles Hendel as The Problem of Knowledge. Philosophy, Science and History since Hegel ( Cassirer 1950 ). Hendel prefaced the volume using touching words, remarking at the same time on the importance of such an unachieved work for a proper understanding of Cassirer’s recent development of thought ( Hendel 1950 , p. XIV). In this way, another side of Cassirer’s legacy was acknowledged and transmitted to further scholarship in the United States. A balanced assessment of this work is due to a scholar as influential as Ernst Nagel, who deemed Cassirer’s book worthy of high appreciation, being “a splendid testimonial to his extraordinary learning, and to his ability for handling a great variety of concrete materials without losing philosophical perspective” ( Nagel 1951 , p. 147). Nagel emphasized the merits of Cassirer for having composed “the best history of modern philosophy in any language” ( Nagel 1951 , p. 151), but stressed several missing elements in his reconstruction such as Marx and Max Weber, not to say of American philosophy, which was for Cassirer still a ”practically undiscovered territory” ( Nagel 1951 p. 150). And finally, grasping an essential feature of Cassirer’s philosophical style, Nagel complained that his immense erudition seemed to “serve as a substitute for forthright systematic analysis” ( Nagel 1951 , p. 151). More evidence of a similar critical approach to Cassirer’s last part of the Problem of Knowledge may be found in the review that Philip P. Wiener published in the Journal of History of Ideas . Among several criticisms, Wiener too stressed that Cassirer had totally ignored American philosophy and, in particular, the classic representatives of Pragmatism; furthermore, Wiener was highly skeptical toward the “most puzzling lacuna in the volume”, namely “the complete silence of Cassirer on the Marxian philosophy of history” ( Wiener 1951 , p. 308).

Although these are nothing but a few documents of Cassirer’s reception in the American post-war years, it is through them that one can gain a first overview of Cassirer’s placement within the milieu who had welcomed him in 1941. To begin with, it seems worth remarking on some affinities with Arthur. O. Lovejoy’s methodological assumptions about the “history of ideas”, which can explain Cassirer’s collaboration with the Journal of History of Ideas from 1942. Lovejoy’s main tenet was that the history of human mind “do[es] not run in enclosed channels corresponding to the officially established divisions of university faculties”; on the contrary, Lovejoy argued, “ideas are the most migratory things in the world” ( Lovejoy 1940 , p. 4), so that they cannot be scattered in “separate departments” or unrelated “provinces” ( Lovejoy 1948 , p. 2). Lovejoy’s historiographical practice, as he had implemented it in his superb book The Great Chain of Being , pivoted around the “unit-ideas”, or types of categories, enabling the reading of history of philosophy “with more attention to the repercussions of philosophic ideas outside the great technical systems, and to be presented in a manner rather different from the usual one“ ( Lovejoy 1948 , p. 8; see also Lovejoy 1936 , pp. 7–20). Having experienced the fascination of the Warburg Library, Cassirer was thus very sensitive to Lovejoy’s purpose to consider the history of ideas as a whole or, in the terms of Cassirer’s philosophy of culture, as an in-between of quite different symbolic forms. Not accidentally, in his essay on Pico della Mirandola (originally written in German and composed in Sweden in 1938, and then translated into English by Paul Oskar Kristeller), Cassirer affirmed in a footnote that at the time of the completion of his paper he “unfortunately” was not yet acquainted with Lovejoy’s book ( Cassirer 1942a , p. 134 footnote 17). Likewise, this statement was something more than mere courtesy toward the Editor of the Journal of the History of ideas . [10]

No wonder, either, that Cassirer published several essays in the Journal , dealing with some of his favorite issues, such as Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, or the philosophical relevance of Renaissance. But this does not mean at all that Cassirer was ready to modify the essential features of his reconstruction of both Renaissance philosophy and scientific revolution. At the same time, Cassirer gave to his American readers exhaustive proof of his way to highlight the history of philosophy and the history of science, discussing in detail the controversy between Leibniz and Newton ( Cassirer 1943 ). Cassirer’s paper was part of a special issue of the Philosophical Review celebrating the “Tercentenary of the Death of Galileo and the Birth of Newton”, having as contributors, beside Cassirer himself, no less than Alexandre Koyré and Leonardo Olschki. Fascinating here is how Cassirer investigates an intriguing history, developing both a careful refence to texts and a steady attention to the conceptual scenario. It is not difficult, in short, to perceive the ability of the great historian of philosophical ideas and scientific theories, who directs however his attention to contemporary implications of a dispute not purely belonging to the archives of history. Cassirer suggests indeed, at the bottom of his reconstruction, that Leibniz was, so to speak, still alive. As Cassirer tells us:

What he [the modern reader] seeks and finds in the documents of the dispute between Leibniz and Newton is something quite different. It is a logical and epistemological, not a metaphysical, problem. As has been shown, it is the logical structure of space and time which was seen in a new light in the philosophy of Leibniz. Instead of propounding a theory of the absolute “essence” of space and time, Leibniz began with a critical study of the “meaning” of these terms. It was this critical tendency of thought which proved to be pregnant with far-reaching consequences for both science and philosophy. When Einstein, two centuries later, developed his special theory of relativity he found it necessary, first and foremost, to analyse the “meaning” of time. This seems to me to be the real point of contact between the views of Leibniz and those of modern science ( Cassirer 1943 , pp. 389–390). [11]

But another, most revealing proof of Cassirer’s late activity in the 1940s is surely the controversy about Galileo’s Platonism that led Cassirer to discuss in particular the interpretation Koyré had just developed in his “excellent article” for the Journal of History of Ideas ( Koyré 1943 ; see Cassirer 1946 ). Koyré had criticized Burtt’s interpretation of Platonism as the fundamental premise of modern mathematical science by distinguishing between two kinds of Platonism: the first being a purely mathematical Platonism, the second closely connected to the mystical-speculative tradition that flourished within the Florence Academy, to which Galileo was entirely foreign. [12] According to Koyré, Galileo was rather involved in the founding of exact science through a straightforwardly oriented mathematical Platonism, a circumstance which Koyré provocatively summarized by stressing that “the new science is for him [Galileo] an experimental proof of Platonism” ( Koyré 1943 , p. 428). In answering Koyré, Cassirer emphasizes a modified account of this story or, at the very least, a more sophisticated point of view. To his mind, Galileo’s Platonism represents a third kind of Platonism, one that is neither metaphysical nor mystical or even simply a mathematical Platonism. Quite differently from Koyré, Cassirer begins with a stimulating historical reconstruction, through which he attempts to describe the physical Platonism underlying Galileo’s scientific revolution. His main point is exactly the significance of this new kind of Platonism, sharply distinguished from the metaphysical or mystical Neoplatonism.

Galileo simply transferred – Cassirer contended – the method of “problematical analysis” that had stood its ground in the history of geometrical and astronomical thought […] He had to deviate both from the principles of Platonism and Aristotelianism. He accepted Plato’s hypothetical method but he gave this method a new ontological status; a status which it had never possessed before ( Cassirer 1946 , p. 351).

At issue here was a crucial question for historians of science and modern philosophy (see also Cassirer 1942b ). The very import of Galileo’s Platonism had been put into question by a seminal essay by John H. Randall jr., published in 1940 in the Journal of History of Ideas . Randall attempted to underline the great influence of the Aristotelian tradition, in the particular of the School of Padua, on the origins and developments of Galileo’s new physics. “History has fallen into error – Randall argued – in accepting uncritically the estimate the pioneer thinkers of the 16th and 17th century made of their own turning away from the heritage of the past” ( Randall 1940 , p. 178). This “error” was, to some extent, the same error upon which Cassirer’s based his account of the relationship between Platonism and the origins of modern science. Cassirer was nevertheless still convinced – as one can easily see in his article Some Remarks on the Question of Originality of Renaissance , also published in the Journal – that the “historical evidence” of some influence of the Aristotelian tradition cannot «seriously shake our conviction of the incomparable scientific originality of Galileo» ( Cassirer 1943 , p. 50). But, excepting Koyré, Cassirer’s assessment of Galilean science was quite isolated among the scholars. Perhaps the most interesting attempt to elaborate a mediated evaluation was due to Kristeller, who would suggest that eminent scientists such as Galileo and Kepler “borrowed much more from that tradition [i.e. from Aristotelian tradition] than one might expect” ( Kristeller 1961 , p. 67). [13]

In the late years of his intellectual biography Cassirer was nonetheless deeply engaged in this field of research and he had undertaken, together with Kristller and Randall, the edition of a collection of texts by Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, and Vives. Unfortunately, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man came to light only in 1948. The editors complained that “the death of Ernst Cassirer will be a serious loss for the readers of this volume. Since he had promised to contribute a general introduction from his pen” ( Kristeller and Randall 1948 , p. V). Indeed, the loss was highly painful not only for scholars of Renaissance thought, but also for an intellectual community which had found in Cassirer both the last of the German Neo-Kantians and the major spokesman of a new alliance between the history of philosophy and the history of science.

4 Concluding Remark

The ongoing connection between a renewed Kantian theory of knowledge, the history of philosophy and the history of science is the essential feature of Cassirer’s work, although the ways of such an investigation underwent many changes and significant transformations in the long way from Marburg to the American exile. In order to attempt an assessment of such a boundless work, we ought firstly to locate Cassirer’s scholarly enterprise in his own time, namely when history of science was not yet professionalized as an academic discipline and was regarded, in a large part, as a field of inquiry not yet dominated by standard methods of research (if any do exist). All this is meant when we speak of Cassirer’s “pioneering” work, which does not signify at all, however, that a similar way of performing the history of science is merely antiquated or, even worse, nowadays deprived of any interest. Cassirer offers, by contrast, a forward-looking answer to the endless disputed question first posed by Hans Reichenbach’s as he suggested the classical distinction between “context of discovery” and “context of justification” in considering scientific theories ( Reichenbach 1938 , pp. 6f.). No doubt can subsist that Cassirer would have considered such a dispute as fundamentally erroneous or, at least, as meaningless. His entire life of philosophical and historical research was spent, as it were, between “discovery” and “context”. Are Galilei’s, Leibniz’s, Newton’s, Einstein’s discoveries possible without their contexts, the latter also being conceptual contexts?

What happened in the aftermath of Cassirer’s work between Europe and United States is surely a topic of amazing interest for scholars aiming at rediscovering the history of the history of science following paths not usually taken. Indeed, one of the more intriguing topics in contemporary debates on history and philosophy of science is the project of a strict integration of history of science and philosophy of science aiming at overcoming their mere “marriage of convenience”, as Ronald N. Giere had defined it in 1973 ( Mauskopf-Schmaltz 2012 , p. 59; see also Stadler 2017 ). Thus, integrated history of science seems to reshape (albeit without any reference to Cassirer) a core issue that was since longtime tackled by Cassirer himself in his peculiar way of dealing with history of philosophy (as a kind of Problemgeschichte ) and history of science (in its connection with both history of philosophy and epistemology). To be sure, no doubt can subsist that great differences emerge when we compare Cassirer’s perspective with today’s debates on this topic. Anyway, it seems still promising to put it within the wider framework of a field of research already featured before its professionalization in the second post-war period.

Since we witness today a veritable renaissance of Cassirer, the question of his legacy both as a historian of philosophy and as a historian of science is, as we have attempted to point out, a very intricate one; but the more we investigate it, the more it turns out that Cassirer’s work has left its traces everywhere. Unfortunately, sometime those traces have been lost and we do not intend to claim that all Cassirer did is still valid today. However, one can say that we should not miss his lesson in considering our present.

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science  is a peer-reviewed book series, dedicated to the history of science and historically informed philosophy of science. The series publishes original scholarship in various related areas, including new directions in epistemology and the history of knowledge within global and colonial contexts. It includes monographs, edited collections, and translations of primary sources in the English language. These cover a broad temporal spectrum, from antiquity to modernity, and all regions of the world.

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Johannes von kries: principles of the probability calculus.

A Logical Investigation

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• Copyright: 2023

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Reconsidering Historical Epistemology

French and Anglophone Styles in History and Philosophy of Science

• Matteo Vagelli
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René Descartes’s Natural Philosophy and Particular Bodies

• Fabrizio Baldassarri

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The Failure of Science, Policy and Common Sense

• Alvin L. Young
• Copyright: 2022

John Venn: Unpublished Writings and Selected Correspondence

• Lukas M. Verburgt

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Dissertations

Marina dimarco (2023).

• Washington University, St. Louis, tenure track
• Philosophy of Science
• ​Dissertation:  Explaining and Intervening in Biosocial Science   

Biosocial scientists claim to improve our understanding of health disparities by integrating social and biological causes of human health and behavior. While many philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science embrace the liberatory promise of biosocial science for the design of clinical interventions and public health policy, others are skeptical. As feminist science scholars Dorothy Roberts, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, and Sarah Richardson point out, the “new biosocial science” often reproduces biologically deterministic explanations of health and behavior that mark marginalized individuals as hard-wired or programmed for pathology. As a result, the subjects of explanation in new biosocial science are often targeted for individualistic interventions, and social determinants of health mysteriously disappear into the background. This project forensically analyzes the disappearance of social causes from biosocial explanations. To begin, I characterize and parse the heterogeneity of biosocial science to focus on a specific genre of these explanations: those which ask how social causes “get under the skin” to become embodied in molecular terms. In the rest of the dissertation, I interrogate the values in, and of, these questions and competing answers to them. My approach draws from feminist science studies, feminist philosophy of science, and work on science and values to embrace pragmatic, social, and political dimensions of explanatory success. This is only fitting for a science that is itself marked by, and conscious of, its own political implications, past and present.

Dasha Pruss (2023)

• George Mason University, tenure track
• ​Dissertation:  Carceral Machines: Algorithmic Risk Assessment and the Reshaping of Crime and Punishment   

Recidivism risk assessment instruments are used in high-stakes pre-trial, sentencing, or parole decisions in nearly every U.S. state. These algorithmic decision-making systems, which estimate a defendant's risk of rearrest or reconviction based on past data, are often presented as an 'evidence-based' strategy for criminal legal reform. In this dissertation, I critically examine how automated decision-making systems like these shape, and are shaped by, social values. I begin with an analysis of algorithmic bias and the limits of technical audits of algorithmic decision-making systems; the subsequent chapters invite readers to consider how social values can be expressed and reinforced by risk assessment instruments in ways that go beyond algorithmic bias. I present novel analyses of the impacts of the Sentence Risk Assessment Instrument in Pennsylvania and cybernetic models of crime in the 1960s Soviet Union. Drawing on methods from history and philosophy of science, sociology, and legal theory, I show not only how societal values about punishment and control shape (and are shaped by) the use of these algorithms – a phenomenon I term domain distortion – but also how the instruments interact with their users – judges – and existing institutional norms around measuring and sentencing crime. My empirical and theoretical findings illustrate the kinds of insidious algorithmic harms that rarely make headlines, and serve as a tonic for the exaggerated and speculative discourse around AI systems in the criminal legal system and beyond.

Dana Matthiessen (2023)

• University of Minnesota, 2-yr Postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  Empirical and Pragmatic Grounds of Scientific Representation   

The central thesis of this dissertation is that the ability to reason and learn about the natural world using models can be explained in terms of the practices that warrant researchers to integrate models with accounts of their data-gathering procedures and act on their behalf. I argue that a model only functions as a representation with respect to a target phenomenon when this phenomenon is a plausible member of its domain of application and when the model can be used to characterize this target from data. I argue that this requires, first, that the model can be compared to data and second, that the model be integrated with an account of the process by which this data was produced from the target phenomenon. I provide an account of the representational accuracy of models based on their integration with a theory of technique and subsequent comparison with data patterns. On the same basis, I provide an account of the pragmatic representational content of models in terms of the set of practical inferences they license as a supplement to the empirical programs within the model’s domain of application. Historically, one often sees a back-and-forth negotiation where a model-based target characterization and a data-gathering practice are iteratively tuned to one another. Models are routinely informed by empirical results in the process of their construction and adjusted in response to them. Conversely, models add depth to target characterizations and fill out theories of technique in ways that alter data-gathering procedures. From this perspective, we can understand how a model’s representational content might gradually accrue to it and allow for finer distinctions in data outcomes. I present an extended case that tracks the development of X-ray crystallography and its use for the characterization of the molecular structure of proteins. Ultimately, what is presented here is intended as a robustly pragmatist account of scientific representation. That is, one that does not only tie model use to purposes, but also to the realm of human action.

Jennifer Whyte (2023)

• Duke University, 2-yr Postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  A New Function for Thought Experiments in Science   

In this dissertation I propose and defend a new account of thought experiments in science and show that it solves an otherwise outstanding problem in the epistemology of models in science. In the first chapter, I argue that a handful of reasonable premises about the epistemic status of science and its models leads to a challenge: shifts in scientific concepts lead to shifts in scientific models that lead to potential non-empirical incompatibilities between them. The solution I propose is to construe the role of thought experiments in science as non-empirical operational tests of models in a hypothetical context of use – as model engineering, rather than a source of evidence. In the second chapter, I fully elaborate this account, demonstrate its features, and compare it to three of the most prominent alternative accounts of thought experiments within the literature. The final two chapters of this dissertation are case studies that use the model-engineering account of thought experiments to interpret thought experiments drawn from the history of physics. In the third chapter, I present the lottery thought experiment from Ludwig Boltzmann’s 1877 paper ‘On the Relationship Between the Second Fundamental Theorem of Heat and Probability Calculations Regarding the Conditions for Thermal Equilibrium’ and show that my account not only well-explains the case, but also explains the absence of this thought experiment from the many subsequent presentations of Boltzmann’s achievement in this paper. In the fourth chapter I present the Rota Aristotelica, a pseudo-Aristotelian mechanical paradox, and through it discuss the intersection of three topics: thought experiments, paradoxes, and historical variability. I show that my account of thought experiments allows that many paradoxes can be interpreted as thought experiments, and that this way of interpreting them can solve outstanding questions about what it means to be the solution of a paradox. My aim in this dissertation is to present a complete picture of an account of thought experiments in science, the way that account fits into contemporary discussions of the epistemology of models in science, and how the account can be used to bring light to historical case studies.

Tom Wysocki (2023)

• University of Heidelberg, 2-yr Postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  Underdeterministic Causation   

Metaphysicians and philosophers of science have recently been analyzing two species of causation: deterministic causes, which guarantee their effects (Hitchcock 2001, Halpern 2016, Weslake 2015, Woodward 2003), and probabilistic causes, which raise the probability of their effects (Fenton-Glynn 2017, Twardy & Korb 2011). Yet, consider: about to jump off the tower, Daedalus realizes he only may escape, but also that if he doesn’t try, he’ll stay imprisoned forever. He jumps and flees, and his jump is a cause of his escape. It’s not a deterministic cause, however, because a successful escape wasn’t guaranteed. It’s not a probabilistic cause either because there needn’t be a fact of the matter how probable his escape was given the jump (maybe the events involved are too unique to be assigned a probabilistic distribution). Rather, his jump is what I call an underdeterministic cause, which elevates the modal status of the effect: the cause made possible what was otherwise impossible. But for the jump, Daedalus wouldn’t have fled, even though the jump didn’t necessitate his escape. No one to date has offered a theory of underdeterministic causes, nor even identified them as a separate causal species. Yet, such causes are frequently studied by the humanistic, natural, and social sciences. If we want to understand what causal claims mean—not only in these disciplines, but in general—we need a theory of underdeterministic causation. My dissertation develops such a theory. Specifically, I build a framework for analyzing underdeterministic causal phenomena (ch. 1). Then, I use it to put forward a semantics of counterfactuals and an algebra of events (ch. 2), a theory of type underdeterministic causation (ch. 3), token causation (ch. 4), an account of the dynamic evolution of context (ch. 5), a superior alternative to the epistemic thesis (ch. 6), and an underdeterministic causal decision theory (ch. 7).

Nedah Nemati (2022)

• Columbia University, 3-yr postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  Lived Experience in the Behavioral Neuroscience of Sleep: Conceptual, Methodological, and Ethical Implications   

Neuroscience is widely thought to shed light on core questions about what it means to be human. The neuroscience literature is also animated by an urgency to render our behaviors knowable through the discipline’s tools and procedures. For example, by studying insect sleep, scientists seek to understand – and in some ways succeed in characterizing – a human process long deemed inaccessible and the opposite of consciousness. Meanwhile, key questions – What is sleep? Where is sleep? Why do humans do it? How can sleep be improved? – resist compact answers and demand novel philosophical insight to link neuroscientific facts to our behavioral experiences. This dissertation applies historical and philosophical approaches to the neuroscientific study of sleep to argue that explaining behavioral experiences relies on lived experience. Examining the study of insect sleep, the first half of the dissertation explores the necessity of these lived experiences in neurobiological studies today, as well as how they have taken shape in the past. The second half of the dissertation then investigates what is lost – philosophically, scientifically, and socially – when the role of lived experience is neglected in empirical investigations.

Katie Morrow (2022)

• University of Bielefeld, 2-yr postdoc

Kathleen Creel (2021)

• Northeastern University (tt)
• ​Dissertation:  Opening the Black Box: Explanation and Transparency in Machine Learning   

Machine learning algorithms remain highly predictively accurate and powerful yet opaque. They predict and classify without offering human-cognizable reasons for their evaluations. When confronted with the opacity of machine learning in science, what is our epistemic situation and what ought we to do to resolve it? In order to answer this question, I first outline a framework for increasing transparency in complex computational systems such as climate simulations and machine learning on big scientific data. I identify three different ways to attain knowledge about these opaque systems and argue that each fulfills a different explanatory purpose. Second, I argue that analogy with the renormalization group helps us choose the better of two philosophically suggestive explanatory strategies that rely on different diagnoses of the success of deep learning. The coarse-graining strategy suggests that highlighting the parts of the input which most contributed to the output will be misleading without two things: an explanation for why the irrelevant parts are themselves irrelevant, and an explanation for the stability of the output under minor perturbations of the input. Armed with a framework for understanding transparency and an analysis of explanatory strategies appropriate for deep learning, I turn to an application of these frameworks to automated science. Automated science is the use of machine learning to automate hypothesis generation, experimental design, performance of experiment, and evaluation of results. If automated science is to find patterns on its own, then it must be able to solve the Molyneux problem for science, namely to recognize identity across modalities or data streams of different types without the aid of causation or correlation.

Mahi Hardalupas (2021)

• Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University, 2-yr postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  How neural is a neural net? Bio-inspired computational models and their impact on the multiple realization debate   

My dissertation introduces a new account of multiple realization called ‘engineered multiple realization’ and applies it to cases of artificial intelligence research in computational neuroscience. Multiple realization has had an illustrious philosophical history, broadly used to describe when a higher-level (psychological) kind can be realized by several different lower-level (physical) kinds. In philosophy of mind, multiple realization is typically seen as arbitrating a debate between metaphysical accounts of the mind, namely functionalism and identity theory. Philosophers of science look to how multiple realization is connected to scientific practice, but many have questioned what it is useful for outside of philosophy of mind. I address this gap by drawing on cases from machine learning and computational neuroscience to show there is a useful form of multiple realization based on engineering practice. My account differs from previous discussions of multiple realization in three ways. First, it reintroduces the link between engineering and multiple realization, which has been mostly neglected in current debates. Second, it is explicitly perspectival, where what counts as multiple realization depends on your perspective. Third, it locates the utility of engineered multiple realization in its ability to support constraint-based reasoning in science. This account provides an answer to concerns about the utility of multiple realization in philosophy of science and explains one way biologically-inspired deep neural networks could provide understanding of the brain. The first half of this dissertation proposes my account of Engineered Multiple Realization and applies it to scientific cases. The second half considers further implications of my account for interpreting Deep Neural Networks as models of the brain, and for mechanistic explanation in computational neuroscience.

Jacob Neal (2021)

• ​Dissertation:  Protein Structure, Dynamics, and Function: A Philosophical Account of Representation and Explanation in Structural Biology   

Most philosophical work in molecular biology has historically centered on DNA, genetics, and questions of reduction. My dissertation breaks from this tradition to make proteins the object of philosophical and historical analysis. The recent history of structural biology and protein science offers untapped potential for history and philosophy of science. My ultimate goal for this dissertation therefore is to identify and analyze some of the key historical and philosophical puzzles that arise in these fields. I focus primarily on the shift from the static to the dynamic view of proteins in the late twentieth century. The static view treated proteins as stable, rigid structures, whereas the dynamic view considers proteins to be dynamic molecules in constant motion. In the first half of the dissertation, I develop a historical account of the origins of the static view of proteins. I show how this view led molecular biologists to adopt mechanistic explanation as their preferred strategy for explaining protein function. I then develop an account of the emergence of the dynamic view of proteins, arguing that thermodynamic theory and the theoretical commitments of scientists played an important and often overlooked role in driving this change. In the second half of the dissertation, I analyze the epistemological relationship between the static and dynamic concepts of the protein and argue that conceptual replacement is occurring. I then develop an account of ensemble explanation, a new type of explanation introduced to highlight the role of dynamics in protein function. I show that these explanations fail to fit existing philosophical accounts of explanation, ultimately concluding that my account is required to capture their epistemic structure.

William Penn (2021)

• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Lecturer
• ​Dissertation:  What's Really Going On: Process Realism in Science   

I argue for a novel form of scientific realism, called “pure process realism,” that rejects orthodox ontologies of static objects and structures. The continuity between an experimenter and experimental systems requires that the processes of intervention and observation are the same ontic type as the observed and inferred features of experimental systems, on pain of ontological incoherence. Therefore, only processes can be inferred to exist within experiments from the epistemology of experiments alone. Additionally, every argument for the existence of a static object or structure within an experiment either fails or fails to rule out that the argument actually supports inferences to a more fundamental process. Firstly, this is because such arguments are either fallacious or inconclusive. Secondly, the history of scientific research, in chemistry and physics in particular, reveals that for each static object or structure posited in the history of science, research eventually redescribes it as a system of processes. For example, the history of the candle flame, the molecule, and the nucleus are explicit evidence of this conclusion, and these examples generalize. By induction, all static objects and structures we could posit are no more than systems of processes. Taken together, these arguments show that pure process realism is superior in scope, strength, and epistemic modesty to orthodox forms of realism in the epistemology, ontology, and history of science.

Shahin Kaveh (2021)

• University of Pittsburgh, Visiting Scholar
• ​Dissertation:  A Prescriptivist Account of Physical Theories   

A question of central importance to any philosopher of science is: what is the essential content of a scientific theory? What does a given theory really tell us about the world? Philosophers of science have disagreed on many aspects of the answer to this question, for instance whether the essential content of theories concerns entities, properties, or structures, whether it should be cashed out in terms of sentences or models, and whether one should be a realist or an anti-realist about this content; but philosophers have near-universally agreed on one claim: that theories provide a description of the natural system to which they are applied. Call this the descriptive-ontological view. I argue against the descriptive-ontological view in physics and propose an alternative: the prescriptivedynamical view. According to the latter, the essential content of a physical theory is to provide prescriptions for interfacing with the natural system. More precisely, physical theories consist of a fixed part and an open-ended part, such that the fixed part is a prescription for constructing the open-ended part from local data, gathered through interaction with the system. The answer to the question of essential content directly determines or at least influences one's response to many other crucial questions such as theoretical equivalence (Chapter 2), theory-world relations (Chapter 3), and realism-antirealism (Chapter 4), which I will subsequently explore. Moreover, as I will argue (Chapter 5), the prescriptivedynamical account also sheds fresh light on the history of quantum mechanics. In particular, the prescriptive-dynamical account allows us to understand the history of Bohr and Heisenberg’s work in the 1920s as a painstaking realization that instead of telling us what there is, physical theories must tell us what to do.

Zina Ward (2020)

• Florida State University (tt)
• ​Dissertation:  Individual Differences in Cognitive Science: Conceptual and Methodological Issues   

A primary aim of cognitive science is the investigation of psychological and neuroscientific generalizations that hold across subjects. Individual differences between people’s minds and brains are pervasive, however, even among subjects considered neurotypical. In this dissertation, I argue that both scientific practice and our philosophical understanding of science must be updated to reflect the presence of such individual differences. The first half of the dissertation proposes and applies a philosophical account of what it takes to explain variation, while the second half identifies several methods in psychology and neuroscience that demand reform in light of existing individual differences.

Evan Pence (2020)

• ​Dissertation:  Four Paradigms in Comparative Psychology

This dissertation examines the development of comparative psychology and the evidence, arguments, and epistemological challenges that have characterized its approach to the question of animal rationality. I distinguish between four modes of research that come to prominence at different points in its history, the natural historical, strict behavioral, cognitive, and neurophysiological, analyzing each through a critical episode in its development and the set of claims associated with the approach. The first study concerns the field’s Darwinian origins and its early commitment to the fundamental similarity of human and animal minds. I argue from a close reading of Darwin’s notebooks that the critical break for the nascent field came not from an antecedent endorsement to evolutionary theory, as commonly supposed, but a set of political and philosophical commitments inherited from the Enlightenment. Next, I show how this approach proved vulnerable to attack from younger and more positivistic psychologists in the twentieth century. I analyze why the Darwinians were accused of employing less than scientific methods, explaining how this fact helped precipitate a shift toward more conservative standards of evidence and strictly lab-based research. From there, I consider how the behavioral tools of this era have left modern ‘cognitive’ research with nagging underdetermination issues. I argue that strictly behavioral methods cannot tell us what the nature of animal thought is but that other methods may. Finally, I consider the state of the rationality debate at present. Drawing on the most recent evidence from systems neuroscience, I argue that animals as distant as rats have the capacity to engage in basic forms of reasoning ventured by Darwin and suspected but never quite shown in the cognitive era.

Morgan Thompson (2020)

• University of Bielefeld, 4-year PD
• Dissertation:  Robustness in the Life Sciences: Issues in Modeling and Explanation

​My dissertation introduces two new accounts of how robustness can be used to identify epistemically trustworthy claims. Through an analysis of research practices in the life sciences, I focus on two main senses of robustness: robust reasoning in knowledge generating inferences and explanatory strategies for phenomena that are themselves robust. First, I provide a new account of robustness analysis (called ‘scope robustness analysis’), in which researchers use empirical knowledge to constrain their search for possible models of the system. Scope robustness analysis is useful for scientific discovery and pursuit whereas current accounts of robustness analysis are useful for confirmation. Second, I provide a new account of how researchers use different methods to produce the same result (a research strategy called ‘triangulation’). My account makes two contributions: I criticize a prominent account of the diversity criterion for methods because it analyzes an inferential strategy (i.e., eliminative inference) distinct from the inferential strategy underlying triangulation (i.e., common cause inductive inferences). My account also better explains how triangulation can fail in practice by assessing points of epistemic risk, which I demonstrate by applying it to implicit attitude research. Finally, I contribute to a debate about another sense of robustness: phenomena that occur regardless of changes in their component parts and activities. I argue that some robust phenomena in network neuroscience are not best explained mechanistically by citing their constituent parts (e.g. individual neurons) and their activities, but rather by appealing to features of the connectivity among brain areas.

Siska de Baerdemaeker (2020)

• Stockholm University, 2-year PD
• Dissertation: Cosmology: The Impossible Integration

​My dissertation introduces a new account of how empirical methods and lines of evidence can come to bear on cosmological model-building. Through a careful study of the recent history of cosmology and dark matter research, I explicate a new type of justification for experiments, a 'method-driven logic'. This structure of justification underlies terrestrial experiments researching dark matter and dark energy, but it is more generally prevalent in cases of an underdescribed target. Using a method-driven logic comes with a cost, however. Specifically, interpreting the empirical results of experiments justified through a method-driven logic is non-trivial: negative results warrant secure constraints on the space of possibilities for the target, whereas significant positive results remain ambivalent. While this ambivalence can be resolved through the amalgamation of multiple lines of evidence, this solution is sometimes faced with conflicts between those lines of evidence. I propose that, under specific circumstances, restricting the relevant empirical evidence can be warranted. Finally, I discuss the use of cosmological evidence as a constraint in other sub fields of physics. This brings me full-circle on the integration of disciplines in cosmology/an integration driven by experimental practice.

Trey Boone (2019, Dec)​

• Duke University, Visiting Fellow
• Dissertation:  Functional Robustness: A New Account of Multiple Realization and its Epistemic Consequences

In this dissertation, I provide a novel account of multiple realization. My account reframes the concept in terms of causal theories of explanation, in contrast to the original framing in terms of the deductive-nomological theory of explanation. I show that the phenomenon of functional robustness exemplifies multiple realization in this new framework. I then explore the epistemic consequences of functional robustness by examining a number of cases of robustness in neural systems. I argue that systems that exhibit robustness will tend to violate causal faithfulness, thus posing challenges to causal hypothesis testing and causal discovery. I then consider the proposal that robustness undermines modularity—i.e. the ability of causal relationships within a system to be independently disrupted. I argue that it does not and instead propose that robustness is often due to feedback control driving systems toward particular outcomes. As a result, robustness will attend failures of acyclicity, not failures of modularity. I conclude by contrasting these epistemic consequences of functional robustness with those traditionally associated with multiple realization.

Haixin Dang (2019)

• Leeds University, 4-year PD
• Dissertation: Epistemology of Scientific Collaborations

This dissertation primarily concerns how scientific collaborations function, how scientists know together, and how we ought to think about collective justification and collective responsibility in light of scientific practice. When a group of 5,000 physicists announces that “The mass of the Higgs boson is 126GeV,” who is responsible for this discovery? Who should be held accountable if the claim turns out to be false or otherwise faulty? My account of collective responsibility seeks to assign responsibility to individual agents, while recognizing that it is the relationships in which individuals stand to each other and to the group which make them the appropriate targets for judgments of responsibility. However, in order to have a decomposition of collective responsibility, we first need to clarify the notion of epistemic responsibility. Epistemic responsibility exists as a vague concept at the intersection between epistemology and ethics. I clarify this concept and show how it can and should work in practice. I argue that epistemic responsibility should be distributed among members of a group when epistemic labor is distributed. My account of epistemic responsibility extends recent work in metaethics on moral responsibility. I decompose the concept into three distinct senses: attributability, answerability, and accountability. An epistemic agent can be responsible in one, two, or all three senses of responsibility. My account recognizes that agents in a collaboration may not all be responsible in the same way or to the same degree. Agents are epistemically responsible depending on their degree of answerability and in virtue of their epistemic position within the group. An important implication of my analysis of collective responsibility is that collective justification does not depend on members always coming to consensus on the justifiers of a group’s conclusions. Existing accounts of collective justification take consensus as the ideal, such that disagreement or heterogeneity among individuals is taken as a negative feature which should be eliminated. I argue that not all disagreement is bad. If the disagreement is itself justified, then disagreement is actually of epistemic value and not a negative feature.

​ David Colaco (2019)

• Mississippi State University, PD
• Dissertation: An Investigation of Scientific Phenomena

To determine how things work, researchers must first determine what things occur. Such an idea seems simple, but it highlights a fundamental aspect of science: endeavors to theorize, explain, model, or control often result from first determining and adequately characterizing the targets of these practices. This dissertation is an investigation of how researchers determine one important kind of target: scientific phenomena. In doing so, I analyze how characterizations of these phenomena are formulated, defended, revised, and rejected in light of empirical research. I focus on three questions. First, what do characterizations of scientific phenomena represent? To answer this, I investigate what it means to characterize a phenomenon, as opposed to describing the results of individual studies. Second, how do researchers develop these characterizations? This question relates to the logic of discovery: I examine how researchers use existing theories and methods to explore systems, search for phenomena, and develop representations of them. Third, how do researchers evaluate these characterizations? This question relates to the logic of justification: I investigate how empirical findings serve as defeasible evidence for the characterizations of phenomena, and in light of what evidence we should accept, suspend judgment about, or reject them.

​ Jeff Sykora (2019)

• Pursuing Medical Training
• Dissertation: Fluid Mechanics, Models, and Realism: Philosophy at the Boundaries of Fluid Systems

Philosophy of science has long drawn conclusions about the relationships between laws, models, and theories from studies of physics. However, many canonical accounts of the epistemic roles of laws and the nature of theories derived their scientific content from either schematized or exotic physical theories. Neither Theory-T frameworks nor investigation on interpretations of quantum mechanics and relativity reflect a majority of physical theories in use. More recently, philosophers of physics have begun developing accounts based in versions of classical mechanics that are both homelier than the exotic physical theories and more mathematically rigorous than the Theory-T frameworks of the earlier canon. Some, including Morrison (1999, 2015), Rueger (2005), and Wilson (2017), have turned to the study of fluid flows as a way to unpack the complex relationships among laws, models, theories, and their implications for scientific realism. One important result of this work is a resurgence of interest in the relationship between the differential equations that express mechanical laws and the boundary conditions that constrain the solutions to those equations. However, many of these accounts miss a crucial set of distinctions between the roles of mathematical boundary conditions modeling physical systems, and the roles of physical conditions at the boundary of the modeled system. In light of this systematic oversight, in this dissertation I show that there is a difference between boundary conditions and conditions at the boundary. I use that distinction to investigate the roles of boundary conditions in the models of fluid mechanics. I argue that boundary conditions are in some cases more lawlike than previously supposed, and that they can play unique roles in scientific explanations. Further, I show that boundaries are inherently mesoscale features of physical systems, which provide explanations that cannot be inferred from microscale dynamics alone. Finally, I argue that an examination of the domain of application of boundary conditions supports a form of realism.

​ Nora Boyd (2018)

• Sienna College (tt)
• Dissertation: Scientific Progress at the Boundaries of Experience

My dissertation introduces a new empiricist philosophy of science built on a novel characterization of empirical evidence and an analysis of empirical adequacy appropriate to it. I analyze historical and contemporary cases primarily, though not exclusively, from the space sciences attending carefully to the intricate practices involved in data collection and processing. I argue that the epistemic utility of empirical results as constraints on theorizing depends on the conditions of their provenance and that therefore information about those conditions ought to be included in our conception of empirical evidence. I articulate the conditions requisite for adjudicating the empirical adequacy of a theory with respect to some evidence and argue that much more background information is required for this adjudication than has been widely appreciated. Although my account is strictly anti-realist, this project is a defense of a sense of epistemic progress in science. Empirical evidence, as I have defined it, genuinely accumulates over the history of human inquiry. We learn that whatever theoretical framework we propose for understanding what the world is like will have to be consistent with this growing evidential corpus.

Aaron Novick (2018)

• Purdue University (tt)
• Dissertation: The Prodigal Genetics Returns: Integrating Gene Regulatory Network Theory Into Evolutionary Theory

The aim of this dissertation is to show how gene regulatory network (GRN) theory can be integrated into evolutionary theory. GRN theory, which lies at the core of evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo), concerns the role of gene regulation in driving developmental processes, covering both how these networks function and how they evolve. Evolutionary and developmental biology, however, have long had an uneasy relationship. Developmental biology played little role in the establishment of a genetic theory evolution during the modern synthesis of the early to mid 20th century. As a result, the body of evolutionary theory that descends from the synthesis period largely lacks obvious loci for integrating the information provided by GRN theory. Indeed, the relationship between the two has commonly been perceived, by both scientists and philosophers, as one of conflict. By combining historical and philosophical analysis, I consider four sources of tension between evo-devo and synthesis-derived evolutionary theorizing in order to show how those tensions can be resolved. I present a picture of the conceptual foundations of evo-devo that reveals the potential for integrating it with existing evolutionary theorizing. In chapter one, I argue that a major historical source of tension between evolutionary and developmental biology was the debates, in the first half of the 20th century, about the possibility of explaining development in terms of gene action. I show that the successes of GRN theory put these worries to bed. In chapter two, I argue that, rather than conceive of evo-devo as typological, we should see it as resting on Cuvieran functionalism. I argue that Cuvieran functionalism complements the Darwinian functionalism of the modern synthesis. In chapter three, I present a picture of the fine structure of the concept ‘homology’. This picture shows how accounts of homology that have traditionally been taken to conflict are in fact compatible and complementary. In chapter four, I analyze the nature of structure/function disputes in terms of types of answers to contrastive why-questions. On the basis of this analysis, I show how the structure of evolutionary theory requires both structuralist and functionalist approaches.

Marina Baldissera Pacchetti (2018)

• University of Leeds (research fellow)
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Climate Science, Environmental Philosophy
• Dissertation: Spatiotemporal Scales in Scientific Modeling: Identifying Target Systems

Current debates about epistemic issues in modeling presuppose that a model in question uncontroversially represents a particular target system. A standard line of argument is that we can gain knowledge of a target system simply by noting what aspects of the target are veridically represented in the model. But this misses epistemically important aspects of modeling. I examine how scientists identify certain phenomena as target systems in their models. Building on the distinction between data and phenomena introduced by Bogen and Woodward, I analyze how scientists target systems from data and from basic theoretical principles. I show that there are two crucial empirical assumptions that are involved in identifying phenomena. These assumptions concern the conditions under which phenomena can be indexed to a particular length or time scale and the conditions under which one can treat phenomena occurring at different length or time scales as distinct. The role of these assumptions in modeling provides the basis for a new argument that shows how, in many cases, idealizations and abstractions in models are essential for providing knowledge about the world in so far as they isolate relevant components of a phenomenon from irrelevant ones. My analysis of the identification of phenomena also shows that structural uncertainty arises in models when the scale of a phenomenon of interest is not properly identified. This clarification promises to improve the communication of the limitation of current climate models to policy makers.

Michael Miller (2017)

• University of Toronto (tt)
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: The structure and interpretation of quantum field theory

Quantum field theory accurately describes the world on the finest scales to which we have empirical access. There has been significant disagreement, however, about which mathematical structures ought to be taken as constitutive of the theory, and thus over which structures should serve as the basis for its interpretation. Perturbative methods allow for successful empirical prediction but require mathematical manipulations that are at odds with the canonical approach to interpreting physical theories that has been passed down from the logical positivists. Axiomatic characterizations of the theory, on the other hand, have not been shown to admit empirically interesting models. This dissertation shows how to understand the empirical success of quantum field theory by reconsidering widely held commitments about how physical meaning accrues to mathematical structure.

Joseph B. McCaffrey (2016)

• Washington University in St. Louis (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) 
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science, General Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Mental function and cerebral cartography: Functional localization in fMRI research

My dissertation examines the relationship between human brain mapping and cognitive theorizing in neuroimaging (fMRI) research. Many researchers advocate using fMRI to test psychological hypotheses; others argue that brain scans cannot support or disconfirm cognitive theories. I argue that fMRI can inform psychology given assumptions about how brain structure relates to function. My diagnosis is that human brain mapping is radically changing due to new techniques (e.g., “resting state” fMRI) and theoretical approaches (e.g., network mapping). These shifts undermine the assumptions that traditionally make fMRI results speak to cognitive theories (e.g., “each region performs a unique function”). I conclude that fMRI research should focus its efforts on developing new bridging assumptions, rather than testing cognitive theories.

Lauren Ross (2016)

• UC Irvine (deferred for post-doc at the University of Calgary)
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Neuroscience, General Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Explanation in Contexts of Causal Complexity

My dissertation examines common types of causal complexity in the biological sciences, the challenges they pose for explanation, and how scientists overcome these challenges. I provide a novel distinction between two types of causal complexity and I analyze explanatory patterns that arise in these contexts. My analysis reveals how explanation in the biological sciences is more diverse than mainstream accounts suggest, which view most or all explanations in this domain as mechanistic. I examine explanations that appeal to causal pathways, dynamical models, and monocausal factors and I show how these explanations are guided by considerations that have been overlooked in the extant literature. My project explores connections between these explanatory patterns and other topics of interest in philosophy and general philosophy of science, including: reduction, multiple realizability, causal selection, and the role of pragmatics in explanation.

Elizabeth O'Neill (2015)

• Eindhoven University of Technology (Assistant Professor)
• Epistemology; Metaethics; Philosophy of Cognitive Science;Philosophy of Biology
• Dissertation: The Epistemological Implications of the Causes of Moral Beliefs

This dissertation investigates what the causes of moral beliefs indicate about the epistemic status of those beliefs. I argue that information about the causes of moral beliefs can tell us whether those beliefs track the truth, and that truth tracking is the primary epistemic property that should concern us in the moral domain. I formulate three novel debunking arguments that employ information about the causes of moral beliefs to support conclusions about truth tracking while minimizing normative assumptions. These arguments lead to the conclusion that harm-related moral beliefs that hinge on sympathy, moral beliefs influenced by disgust, certain political beliefs, and beliefs about punishment that are subject to the influence of extraneous emotions do not track moral truth. For each of these types of moral beliefs, information about the proximal causes of the moral belief supports epistemic conclusions. I compare the value of information about proximal and distal causes for assessing epistemic status: I argue that proximal causes are a superior source of information, but under certain conditions, we should take information about distal causes into account. In the case of beliefs about the fair distribution of resources, information about their proximal causes does not shed light on whether they track truth, but information about their distal, evolutionary origins tell us that such beliefs do not track the truth. Thus, using empirical information about the causes of moral beliefs, I offer selective debunking arguments for five types of moral beliefs.

Greg Gandenberger (2015)

• University of Bristol (Postdoctoral Fellow)
• Philosophy of Science, Epistemology, Philosophy of Physics
• Dissertation: Moving Beyond 'Theory T': The Case of Quantum Field Theory

A standard approach towards interpreting physical theories proceeds by first identifying the theory with a set of mathematical objects, where such objects are defined according to mathematicians' standards of rigor. In making this identification, philosophers rule out the relevance of many inferential methods that physicists use, as these often do not meet mathematicians' standards of rigor. Philosophers thus sanitize physical theories of all mathematically messy or ambiguous parts before interpreting them.

My dissertation argues against this sanitized approach towards interpreting theories using the example of quantum field theory (QFT). When we look at the details of QFT, we find that the mathematical objects it requires differ according to the specific systems the theory is being applied to in ways that advocates of the sanitized approach do not anticipate. Furthermore, the mathematical objects required for successful application are still being developed in some applicational contexts, so it would be unwise to determine in advance which objects constitute the theory. During this ongoing developmental process, physicists interpret the mathematics using strategies that violate the standards of pure mathematics. In contrast to the sanitized approach, these strategies are more sensitive to the ways in which the mathematics required for the relevant contexts is still under development. I argue that these strategies are not merely instrumental. They suggest alternative approaches to interpretation that philosophers should take into account.

Julia Bursten (2015)

• University of Kentucky (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Chemistry, Philosophy of Physics
• Dissertation: Surfaces, Scales, and Synthesis: Scientific Reasoning at the Nanoscale

Philosophers interested in scientific methodology have focused largely on physics, biology, and cognitive science. They have paid considerably less attention to sciences such as chemistry and nanoscience, where not only are the subjects distinct, but the very aims differ: chemistry and nanoscience center around synthesis. Methods associated with synthesis do not fit well with description, explanation, and prediction that so dominate aims in philosophers' paradigm sciences. In order to synthesize a substance or material, scientists need different kinds of information than they need to predict, explain, or describe. Consequently, they need different kinds of models and theories.

Specifically, chemists need additional models of how reactions will proceed. In practice, this means chemists must model surface structure and behavior, because reactions occur on the surfaces of materials. Physics, and by extension much of philosophy of science, ignores the structure and behavior of surfaces, modeling surfaces only as “boundary conditions” with virtually no influence on material behavior. Such boundary conditions are not seen as part of the physical laws that govern material behavior, so little consideration has been given to their roles in improving scientists' understanding of materials and aiding synthesis. But especially for theories that are used in synthesis, such neglect can lead to catastrophic modeling failures. In fact, as one moves down toward the nanoscale, the very concept of a material surface changes, with the consequence that nanomaterials behave differently than macroscopic materials made up of the same elements. They conduct electricity differently, they appear differently colored, and they can play different roles in chemical reactions. This dissertation develops new philosophical tools to deal with these changes and give an account of theory and model use in the synthetic sciences. Particularly, it addresses the question of how models of materials at the nanoscale fit together with models of those very same materials at scales many orders of magnitude larger. To answer this and related questions, strict attention needs to be paid to the ways boundaries, surfaces, concepts, models, and even laws change as scales change.

Aleta Quinn (2015)

• Caltech (Postodctoral Instructor in Philosophy of Science)
• History and Philosophy of Biology, Values and Science
• Dissertation: Biological Systematics and Evolutionary Theory

In this dissertation I examine the role of evolutionary theory in systematics (the science of discovering and classifying biodiversity). Following Darwin's revolution, systematists have aimed to reconstruct the past. Understanding what it means that systematists reconstruct the past requires clarifying the history of systematics and of some important episodes in philosophy of science. My dissertation analyzes a common but inadequate view about what systematics qua historical science is up to by tracing the inadequate view to its origins in J.S. Mill. I show that critiques advanced by Mill's contemporary, William Whewell, identify problems that recurred in twentieth century philosophical work on the historical sciences. I develop an alternative and more complete account of systematics as relying on inference to the best explanation. My account answers two challenges that have been pressed against philosophical attempts to analyze scientific reasoning as inference to the best explanation.

First, I analyze the inadequate view: that scientists use causal theories to hypothesize what past chains of events must have been, and then form historical hypotheses which identify segments of a network of past events and causal transactions between events. This model assumes that scientists can identify events in the world by reference to neatly delineated properties, and that discovering causal laws is simply a matter of testing what regularities hold between events so delineated. Twentieth century philosophers of science tacitly adopted this assumption in otherwise distinct models of explanation. As Whewell had pointed out in his critique of Mill, the problem with this assumption is that the delineation of events via properties is itself the hard part of science. Whewell's philosophy of science captures the key point that different scientific theories identify different types of properties and events. Distinct scientific theories may not agree on how to individuate either properties or events. The case of systematics illustrates this dramatically.

Drawing on Whewell's philosophy of science, and my work as a member of a team of systematists revising the genus Bassaricyon, I show how historical scientists avoid the problems of the inadequate view. Whewell's analysis of consilience in the historical sciences and in biological classification provides a better foothold for understanding systematics. Whewell's consilience describes the fit between a single hypothesis and evidence drawn from distinct scientific theories that are organized under wholly different conceptual structures. This fit does not require agreement about causal ontology in the way required by the inadequate view that I have critiqued.

My analysis clarifies the significance of two revolutions in systematics. Whereas pre-Darwinian systematists used consilience as an evidentiary criterion without explicit justification, after Darwin's revolution consilience can be understood as a form of inference to the best explanation. I show that the adoption of Hennig's phylogenetic systematics, a twentieth century revolution in systematics, formalized methodological principles at the core of Whewell's philosophy of the historical sciences. Drawing on the philosophical and historical resources developed in the dissertation, I conclude by showing how two challenges that are frequently pressed against inference to the best explanation are met in the context of phylogenetic systematics.

Kathryn Tabb (2015)

• Coumbia University (Assistant Professor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Psychiatry, Biomedical Ethics
• Dissertation: Mad Errors: Associated Ideas, Enthusiasm, and Personal Identity in Locke

Associationism — in its most basic formulation, the view that all cognition begins with the compounding of simple sensations into chains of ideas — is frequently held to have been introduced by John Locke in 1700, expanded on by David Hartley and David Hume, and come into its own the nineteenth century with psychologists like James Mill and Alexander Bain. The aim of this dissertation is to argue that Locke is not an associationist, and that he has been cast on the wrong side of a fundamental divide over the role of the understanding in the connection of ideas. I show that Locke coins the term “association of ideas” not to launch a new architectonic for psychology based on acquired habit, but to diagnose what he sees as the biggest obstacle to right understanding: madness. Hume's positive embrace of association has often been read back onto Locke, resulting in the easy conflation of the two thinkers under the banner of empiricism. In championing the powers of the active perception over the automaticity of association, however, Locke's psychology stands apart from later empiricist philosophies of mind.

Along with challenging Locke's traditional characterization as an associationist, my project explores the ramifications of Locke's concept of association for his broader commitments. Locke believes that natural philosophy is possible due to the ability of men and women to perceive the truth or falsity of propositions, or, failing this, to make probabilistic judgments about their truth-value. The capacities that allow for these mental acts, reason and judgment (respectively), are gifts from God that allow us to flourish in our environment, despite our mediocre mental endowments. I argue that associated ideas show that these capacities sometimes fail us, compromising Locke's intellectualist picture. False knowledge is possible in Locke's system, insofar as associated ideas generate propositions that are perceived to be true but which are in fact false. I call such propositions “mad errors,” and describe their profound ramifications for Locke's ethics of belief and his theory of personal identity.

Elay Shech (2015)

• Auburn University (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Ethics
• Dissertation: Assume a Spherical Cow: Studies on Representation and Idealizations

My dissertation concerns the philosophical underpinnings of representation and idealization in science. I begin by looking at the philosophical debate revolving around phase transitions and use it as a foil to bring out what I take to be most interesting about phase transitions, namely, the manner by which the illustrate the problem of essential idealizations.

I continue to solve the problem in several steps. First, I conduct an interdisciplinary comparative study of different types of representations (e.g., mental, linguistic, pictorial) and consequently promote a content-based account of scientific representation intended to accommodate the practice of idealization and misrepresentation. I then critically asses the literature on idealizations in science in order to identify the manner by which to justify appeals to idealizations in science, and implement such techniques in two case studies that merit special attention: the Aharonov-Bohm effect and the quantum Hall effects. I proceed to offer a characterization of essential idealizations meant to alleviate the woes associated with said problem, and argue that particular types of idealizations, dubbed pathological idealizations, ought to be dispensed with. My motto is that idealizations are essential to explanation and representation, as well as to methodology and pedagogy, but they essentially misrepresent. Implications for the debate on platonism about mathematical objects are outlined.

Karen Zwier (2014)

• Drake University (Adjunct Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, History and Philosophy of Physical Science, Science and Religion
• Dissertation: Interventionist Causation in Physical Science

The current consensus view of causation in physics, as commonly held by scientists and philosophers, has several serious problems. It fails to provide an epistemology for the causal knowledge that it claims physics to possess; it is inapplicable in a prominent area of physics (classical thermodynamics); and it is difficult to reconcile with our everyday use of causal concepts and claims.

In this dissertation, I use historical examples and philosophical arguments to show that the interventionist account of causation constitutes a promising alternative for a “physically respectable” account of causation. The interventionist account explicates important parts of the experimental practice of physics and important aspects of the ways in which physical theory is used and applied. Moreover, the interventionist account succeeds where the consensus view of causation in physics fails.

I argue that the interventionist account provides an epistemology of causal knowledge in physics that is rooted in experiment. On the interventionist view, there is a close link between experiment and the testing of causal claims. I give several examples of experiments from the early history of thermodynamics that scientists used in interventionist-type arguments. I also argue that interventionist claims made in the context of a physical theory can be epistemically justified by reference to the experimental interventions and observations that serve as evidence for the theory.

I then show that the interventionist account of causation is well-suited to the patterns of reasoning that are intrinsic to thermodynamic theory. I argue that interventionist reasoning constitutes the structural foundation of thermodynamic theory, and that thermodynamic theory can provide clear answers to meaningful questions about whether or not a certain variable is a cause of another in a given context.

Finally, I argue that the interventionist account offers the prospect of a unification of “physically respectable” causation and our everyday notion of causation. I conclude the dissertation by sketching an anti-foundationalist unification of causation, according to which causal reasoning occurs in the same manner in physics as it does in other branches of life and scientific research.

Eric Hatleback (2014)

• University of Pittsburgh (Research Associate Professor)
• Philosophy of Cosmology, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Chimera of the Cosmos

Multiverse cosmology exhibits unique epistemic problems because it posits the existence of universes inaccessible from our own. Since empirical investigation is not possible, philosophical investigation takes a prominent role. The inaccessibility of the other universes causes argumentation for the multiverse hypothesis to be wholly dependent upon typicality assumptions that relate our observed universe to the unobserved universes. The necessary reliance on typicality assumptions results in the Multiverse Circularity Problem: the multiverse hypothesis is justified only through invoking typicality assumptions, but typicality assumptions are justified only through invoking the multiverse hypothesis. The unavoidability of the circularity is established through argumentation for each of the two conjuncts that comprise it.

Historical investigation proves the first conjunct of the Multiverse Circularity Problem. Detailed study of the now-neglected tradition of multiverse thought shows that philosophers and scientists have postulated the multiverse hypothesis with regularity, under different names, since antiquity. The corpus of argumentation for the existence of the multiverse breaks cleanly into three distinct argument schemas: implication from physics, induction, and explanation. Each of the three argument schemas is shown to be fully reliant upon unsupported typicality assumptions. This demonstrates that the multiverse hypothesis is justified only through invoking typicality assumptions.

Philosophical assessment of cosmological induction establishes the second conjunct of the Multiverse Circularity Problem. Independent justification for typicality assumptions is not forthcoming. The obvious candidate, enumerative induction, fails: Hume's attack against inference through time is extended to inference through space. This move undercuts external justification for typicality assumptions, such as the Cosmological Principle, which cosmologists implement to justify induction. Removing the legitimacy of enumerative induction shows that typicality assumptions are justified only through invoking the multiverse hypothesis, thereby establishing the Multiverse Circularity Problem.

Yoichi Ishida (2014)

• Ohio University (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology
• Dissertation: Models in Scientific Practice

This dissertation presents an account of the practice of modeling in science in which scientists' perceptual and bodily interactions with external representations take center stage. I argue that modeling is primarily a practice of constructing, manipulating, and analyzing external representations in service of cognitive and epistemic aims of research, and show that this account better captures important aspects of the practice of modeling than accounts currently popular in philosophy of science.

Philosophical accounts of the practice of modeling classify models according to the categories of abstract and concrete entities developed in metaphysics. I argue that this type of account obscures the practice of modeling. In particular, using the analysis of the Lotka-Volterra model as an example, I argue that understanding mathematical models as abstract entities---non-spatiotemporally located, imperceptible entities---obscures the fact that the analysis of the Lotka-Volterra model relies primarily on visual perception of external representations, especially hand- or computer-generated graphs. Instead, I suggest that we apply the concepts of internal and external representations, developed in cognitive science, to models, including mathematical models.

I then present two case studies that illustrate different aspects of modeling, understood as a practice of constructing, manipulating, and analyzing external representations. First, using Sewall Wright's long-term research on isolation by distance, I articulate the relationship between the uses of a model, the particular aims of research, and the criteria of success relevant to a given use of the model. I argue that uses of the same model can shift over the course of scientists' research in response to shifts in aim and that criteria of success for one use of a model can be different from those for another use of the same model. Second, I argue that in successful scientific research, a scientist uses a model according to the methodological principles of realism and instrumentalism despite the tension that they create among the scientist's uses of the model over time. This thesis is supported by a detailed analysis of successful scientific research done by Seymour Benzer in the 1950s and 60s.

Keith Bemer (2014)

• Winchester Thurston School (science teacher)
• Classics, Philosophy, and Ancient Science
• Ancient Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science, Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: A Philosophical Examination of Aristotle's Historia Animalium

In this dissertation I address two related questions pertaining to Aristotle's philosophy of science and his biology and zoology. They are: (1) what are the goals of Aristotle's Historia Animalium (HA) and how does the treatise achieve these goals? And, more generally, (2) what is the role of a historia in Aristotle's philosophy of science?

Together these questions touch upon a long recognized problem in the interpretation of Aristotle's philosophical and scientific works related to the relationship between Aristotle's philosophy of science and his actual scientific practice. I pursue this broad question by focusing my attention on Aristotle's historia of animals and the related discussions of scientific investigation and demonstration, primarily in the Analytics . I argue that the term historia was used by Aristotle with a range of meanings that center around the notions of investigation and inquiry (or the reports thereof), and, in some instances, emphasize the early stages of inquiry, dedicated to establishing and organizing facts prior to causal explanation. I proceed by considering the theoretical background of a historia provided by the Analytics and Parts of Animals , before turning to a detailed analysis of select passages from the HA itself. I argue that the Analytics provides the framework for a method of correlating facts regarding a field of study that acts as a guide to further causal research, but that establishing the actual causal relations that hold within a field depends upon additional considerations that are largely domain-specific. I turn to the HA in order to illustrate this method of correlation, noting examples where the correlation of features appears to prefigure causal explanations. I conclude by considering the relationship between Aristotle's notions of historia and experience ( empeiria ), and argue that a historia provides the sort of comprehensive, factual knowledge of a domain of study that Aristotle often notes is necessary for coming to recognize causal relations, and thus coming to have scientific knowledge ( epistêmê ).

Marcus Adams (2014)

• University at Albany, SUNY (Assistant Professor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, History & Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Mechanical Epistemology and Mixed Mathematics: Descartes's Problems and Hobbes's Unity

My dissertation answers the following question: How is Hobbes's politics related to his physics and metaphysics? I argue that Hobbes does in fact provide a unified systematic philosophy, and I contrast this unity with problems in Descartes's epistemology and optics.

To make this argument, I carve a middle way between the two extremes in the literature by situating Hobbes within mechanical philosophy and 17th century mathematics. I use three concepts to clarify Hobbes's project: mechanical explanation, maker's knowledge, and mixed mathematical science. First, I show that for Hobbes a mechanical explanation involves tracing the motions of bodies at various levels of complexity, from simple points in geometry to human bodies in the state of nature and to commonwealth bodies. This view provides Hobbes with resources for a naturalized epistemology, which I show is the point at issue in Hobbes's Objections to Descartes's Meditations . Second, Hobbes says that we have "maker's knowledge" in geometry and politics. I show that "maker's knowledge" is Hobbes's empiricist answer to (1) how we have causal knowledge in politics and mathematics by constructing and (2) how mathematics is applicable to the world. Finally, I show that the mixed mathematical sciences, e.g., optics, were Hobbes's inspiration for a unified philosophical system. I argue that the physics in De corpore , the optics in De homine , and the politics in Leviathan are treated by Hobbes as mixed mathematical sciences, which provides a new way to see Hobbes as a consistent and non-reductive naturalist. Viewed in this light, the Leviathan turns out to have more methodological similarities to optics than to geometry.

Thomas Pashby (2014)

• University of Southern California (Postdoc)
• Dissertation: Time and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

This dissertation aims at understanding, and challenging, the common view that "time is a parameter in quantum theory and not an observable." I argue that — like position in space — location in time of an event is an observable quantity.

The celebrated argument of Wolfgang Pauli against the inclusion of time as an observable of the theory ('Pauli's Theorem') has been seen as a demonstration that time may only enter quantum mechanics as a classical parameter. Against this orthodoxy I argue that there are good reasons to expect certain kinds of 'time observables' to find a representation within quantum theory, including clock operators (which provide the means to measure the passage of time) and event time operators, which provide predictions for the time at which a particular event occurs, such as the appearance of a dot on a luminescent screen. I contend that these time operators deserve full status as observables of the theory, and on reflection provide a uniquely compelling reason to expand the set of observables allowed by the standard formalism of quantum mechanics. In addition, I provide a novel association of event time operators with conditional probabilities, and propose a temporally extended form of quantum theory to better accommodate the time of an event as an observable quantity. This leads to a proposal to interpret quantum theory within an event ontology, inspired by Bertrand Russell's Analysis of Matter. On this basis I mount a defense of Russell's relational theory of time against a recent attack.

T homas V. Cunningham (2013)

• Medical Bioethics Director, Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles
• Philosophy of Biology and Medicine, Applied Ethics, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Socializing Medical Practice: A Normative Model of Medical Decision-Making

This dissertation is about the way people should and do make medical choices. It defends the claim that medical decisions should be made by groups of persons acting together, not by individuals acting alone.

I begin by arguing that prominent models of medical decision-making are problematic, because they fail to be both descriptively and normatively adequate , which I argue any account of choice in medicine should be. The remainder of the work articulates a model that meets these two criteria. First, I justify an account of the uniquely medical context my model is designed to apply to by distinguishing two basic aims of medicine : (i) to fully understand patients in personal and scientific terms; and, (ii) to intervene upon patients' health states in ways that are consistent with this understanding. Then, I take two chapters to develop a descriptive account of medical decision-making. In them, I introduce a close study of the case of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer decision-making, which I argue shows choices are made by groups of interacting persons over extended spatiotemporal and social dimensions. So, I appeal to the theory of distributed cognition to describe this collection of persons processing information together when making choices. Having defended a descriptive account of medical choice, I then take two more chapters to propose a normative account, based on a modified version of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium that I call medical reflective equilibrium . On my account, medical choices should be made by searching for, selecting, and integrating the right kind and amount of information, which requires considering sufficient information to meet the basic aims of medicine. Given that the basic aims are defined in terms of an epistemic distinction between subjective and objective knowledge , I argue that performing the medical reflective equilibrium procedure adequately requires multiple participants in decision-making. Consequently, I conclude that medical choices are and should be social.

Balázs Gyenis (2013)

• Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Research Fellow), London School of Economics (Research Fellow)
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Probabilistic Causality
• Dissertation: Well posedness and physical possibility

There is a sentiment shared among physicists that well posedness is a necessary condition for physical possibility. The arguments usually offered for well posedness have an epistemic flavor and thus they fall short of establishing the metaphysical claim that lack of well posedness implies physical impossibility. My dissertation analyzes the relationship of well posedness to prediction and confirmation as well as the notion of physical possibility and we devise three novel and independent argumentative strategies that may succeed where the usual epistemic arguments fail.

Peter Distelzweig (2013)

• University of St. Thomas, Minnesota (Assistant Professor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Descartes' Teleomechanics in Medical Context: Approaches to Integrating Mechanism and Teleology in Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, William Harvey and René Descartes

In this dissertation, I examine the relation between mechanism and teleology in Descartes's physiology, placing his views in the wider medical context.

There, as I show, we find a very different, Galeno-Aristotelian approach to integrating mechanics and teleology in the work of anatomists Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente and his more famous student, William Harvey. I provide an interpretation of teleology and mechanism in Descartes by exploring the historical and conceptual relationship between his approach and that exhibited by these anatomists. First, I show that Fabricius and Harvey develop creative, teleological, and non-reductive approaches to mechanizing the animal precisely by developing Arisotelian and Galenic resources. They propose that mathematical mechanics, understood as an Aristotelian subordinate science, should be employed to articulate the way the functions of the locomotive organs explain (as final causes) certain features of their anatomy, rendering them hypothetically necessary. They articulate these explanations using the Galenic concepts ofactio and usus . Employing the resources developed in my analysis of Fabricius and Harvey, I then provide a new interpretation of the relation of mechanism and teleology in Descartes and of its significance. Although he explicitly rejects final causes in natural philosophy, Descartes still appeals in physiology to apparently teleological concepts like function and usage. By focusing on the medical context of these concepts, I show that Descartes intends to and primarily does employ these terms in mechanical explanations meant to replace the metaphysically more extravagant but still material-efficient (not final causal) explanations present in the medical tradition. I argue, further, that Descartes at times does in fact employ final causal explanations like those in Fabricius's and Harvey's work and that he is hard-pressed to ground these explanations while still rejecting both divine purposes and non-mechanical principles in natural philosophy.

Catherine Stinson (2013)

• Western University (Postdoc)
• History & Philosophy of Neuroscience & Psychology
• Dissertation: Cognitive Mechanisms and Computational Models: Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive Neuroscience seeks to integrate cognitive psychology and neuroscience. I critique existing analyses of this integration project, and offer my own account of how it ought to be understood given the practices of researchers in these fields.

A recent proposal suggests that integration between cognitive psychology and neuroscience can be achieved `seamlessly' via mechanistic explanation. Cognitive models are elliptical mechanism sketches, according to this proposal. This proposal glosses over several difficulties concerning the practice of cognitive psychology and the nature of cognitive models, however. Although psychology's information-processing models superficially resemble mechanism sketches, they in fact systematically include and exclude different kinds of information. I distinguish two kinds of information-processing model, neither of which specifies the entities and activities characteristic of mechanistic models, even sketchily. Furthermore, theory development in psychology does not involve the filling in of these missing details, but rather refinement of the sorts of models they start out as. I contrast the development of psychology's attention filter models with the development of neurobiology's models of sodium channel filtering. I argue that extending the account of mechanisms to include what I define as generic mechanisms provides a more promising route towards integration. Generic mechanisms are the in-the-world counterparts to abstract types. They thus have causal-explanatory powers which are shared by all the tokens that instantiate that type. This not only provides a way for generalizations to factor into mechanistic explanations, which allows for the `-looking' explanations needed for integrating cognitive models, but also solves some internal problems in the mechanism literature concerning schemas and explanatory relevance. I illustrate how generic mechanisms are discovered and used with examples from computational cognitive neuroscience. I argue that connectionist models can be understood as approximations to generic brain mechanisms, which resolves a longstanding philosophical puzzle as to their role. Furthermore, I argue that understanding scientific models in general in terms of generic mechanisms allows for a unified account of the types of inferences made in modeling and in experiment.

Benjamin Goldberg (2012)

• University of South Florida (Permanent Instructor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, History of Science and Medicine
• Dissertation: William Harvey, Soul Searcher: Teleology and Philosophical Anatomy

The goal of this dissertation is to understand the ways in which teleology structures the natural philosophy of William Harvey (1578-1657), the physician and philosopher who discovered the circulation of the blood, announced in his De motu cordis (1628).

In particular, I hope to incorporate new archival research, as well as the study of a number of texts that have not yet received due attention, including the Prelectiones anatomie universalis (1616-1627) and the De generatione animalium (1651). The study is divided into three parts. The first two parts focus on the role of two sorts of teleology in defining Harvey's subject matter. I first discuss the teleology of being, which characterizes the functioning and material organization of the parts of the body, and which we would call today 'physiology and anatomy'. I then turn to examine the teleology of becoming, which characterizes the process of the generation of those parts, what we would call today 'embryological development'. Thus Harvey's subject matter must be understood as the study of, and search for, final causes. The third section shifts to examining Harvey's methods in light of this conception of the subject matter. I start by articulating how, in general, Harvey conceives of anatomy not as a body of pre-existing knowledge, but rather as an active ability, combining skills of hand, eye, and mind. I then turn to look in detail at Harvey's particular methods, such as vivisection and broad comparisons across animals. I argue that his methodology should be seen as an innovative reinterpretation and extension of the philosophies of Aristotle and Galen, mediated by certain Renaissance trends in medicine and natural philosophy. I focus specifically on how experience and experiment, observing and cutting, are used by Harvey to determine the final causes so central to his conception of his subject matter.

Bryan Roberts (2012)

• London School of Economics (Lecturer)
• History and philosophy of physics
• Dissertation: Time, Symmetry and Structure: Studies in the Foundations of Quantum Theory

This dissertation is about the meaning and distinction between the past and the future according to our fundamental physical laws.

I begin with an account of what it means for quantum theory to make such a distinction. I then show that if Galilei invariant quantum theory does distinguish a preferred direction in time, then this has consequences for the ontology of the theory. In particular, it requires matter to admit internal degrees of freedom. I proceed to show that this is not a purely quantum phenomenon, but can be expressed in classical mechanics as well. I then illustrate three routes for generating quantum systems that distinguish a preferred temporal direction in this way.

Jonathan Livengood (2011)

• University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Statistics
• Dissertation: On Causal Inferences in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Actual Causation

The last forty years have seen an explosion of research directed at causation and causal inference. Statisticians developed techniques for drawing inferences about the likely effects of proposed interventions: techniques that have been applied most noticeably in social and life sciences. Computer scientists, economists, and methodologists merged graph theory and structural equation modeling in order to develop a mathematical formalism that underwrites automated search for causal structure from data. Analytic metaphysicians and philosophers of science produced an array of theories about the nature of causation and its relationship to scientific theory and practice.

Jonah Schupbach (2011)

• University of Utah (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Epistemology (including Formal Epistemology), Logic
• Dissertation: Studies in the Logic of Explanatory Power

Human reasoning often involves explanation. In everyday affairs, people reason to hypotheses based on the explanatory power these hypotheses afford; I might, for example, surmise that my toddler has been playing in my office because I judge that this hypothesis delivers a good explanation of the disarranged state of the books on my shelves. But such explanatory reasoning also has relevance far beyond the commonplace. Indeed, explanatory reasoning plays an important role in such varied fields as the sciences, philosophy, theology, medicine, forensics, and law.

Justin Sytsma (2010)

• Victoria University of Wellington (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Dissertation: Phenomenal consciousness as scientific phenomenon? A Critical Investigation of the New Science of Consciousness

Phenomenal consciousness poses something of a puzzle for philosophy of science. This puzzle arises from two facts: It is common for philosophers (and some scientists) to take its existence to be phenomenologically obvious and yet modern science arguably has little (if anything) to tell us about it. And, this is despite over 20 years of work targeting phenomenal consciousness in what I call the new science of consciousness. What is it about this supposedly evident phenomenon that has kept it beyond the reach of our scientific understanding? I argue that phenomenal consciousness has resisted scientific explanation because there is no such phenomenon: What is in fact phenomenologically obvious has not resisted scientific explanation, exposing phenomenal consciousness as an unneeded and unwarranted theoretical construct that is not supported by the scientific evidence. I show this through an investigation of the new science. I detail how these researchers understand “phenomenal consciousness,” tie this understanding to the recent philosophical debates, and critically assess the reasons given for believing that such a scientific phenomenon exists.

Holly Andersen (2009)

• Simon Fraser University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected] Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology & Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology/Metaphysics-->
• Dissertation: The Causal Structure of Conscious Agency

I examine the way implicit causal assumptions about features of agency and action affect the philosophical conclusions we reach from neuroscientific results, as well as provide a positive account of how to incorporate scientific experiments on various features of agency into philosophical frameworks of volition, using tools from interventionist causal analysis and research on human automatism. I also provide new, general, arguments for the autonomy for any higher level causes, including but not limited to features of conscious agency.

Peter Gildenhuys (2009)

• Lafayette College (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Science, Biomedical Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Causal Reasoning, Philosophy of Language
• Dissertation: A Causal Interpretation of Selection Theory

My dissertation is an inferentialist account of classical population genetics. I present the theory as a definite body of interconnected inferential rules for generating mathematical models of population dynamics. To state those rules, I use the notion of causation as a primitive. First, I put forward a rule stating the circumstances of application of the theory, one that uses causal language to pick out the types of entities over which the theory may be deployed. Next, I offer a rule for grouping such entities into populations based on their competitive causal relationships. Then I offer a general algorithm for generating classical population genetics models suitable for such populations on the basis of information about what causal influences operate within them.

Julie Zahle (2009)

• University of Copenhagen (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology & Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology/Metaphysics
• Dissertation: Practices, Perception, and Normative States

Theories of practice are widespread within the humanities and the social sciences. They reflect the view that the study of, and theorizing about, social practices hold the key to a proper understanding of social life or aspects thereof. An important subset of theories of practice is ability theories of practice. These theories focus on the manner in which individuals draw on their abilities, skills, know-how, or practical knowledge when participating in social practices.

Zvi Biener (2007)

• University of Cincinnati (Assistant Professor)
• Metaphysics and Epistemology in the Early-Modern Period, History of Philosophy
• Dissertation: The Unity and Structure of Knowledge: Subalternation, Demonstration, and the Geometrical Manner in Scholastic-Aristotelianism and Descartes

The project of constructing a complete system of knowledge—a system capable of integrating all that is and could possibly be known—was common to many early-modern philosophers and was championed with particular alacrity by René Descartes. The inspiration for this project often came from mathematics in general and from geometry in particular: Just as propositions were ordered in a geometrical demonstration, the argument went, so should propositions be ordered in an overall system of knowledge. Science, it was thought, had to proceed more geometrico. In this dissertation, I offer a new interpretation of 'science more geometrico' based on an extended analysis of the explanatory and argumentative forms used in certain branches of geometry. These branches were optics, astronomy, and mechanics; the so-called subalternate, subordinate, or mixed-mathematical sciences. In Part I, I investigate the nature of the mixed-mathematical sciences according to Aristotle and early-modern scholastic-Aristotelians. In Part II, the heart of the work, I analyze the metaphysics and physics of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (1644, 1647) in light of the findings of Part I and an example from Galileo. I conclude by arguing that we must broaden our understanding of the early-modern conception of 'science more geometrico' to include exemplars taken from the mixed-mathematical sciences. These render the concept more flexible than previously thought.

Brian Hepburn (2007)

• Wichita State University (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Physics, History of Science
• Dissertation: Equilibrium and Explanation in 18th Century Mechanics

The received view of the Scientific Revolution is that it was completed with the publication of Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. The century following was relegated to a working out the mathematical details of Newton's program, expression into analytic form. I show that the mechanics of Leonhard Euler (1707—1782) and Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736—1813) did not begin with Newton's Three Laws. They provided their own beginning principles and interpretations of the relation between mathematical description and nature. Functional relations among the quantified properties of bodies were interpreted as basic mechanical connections between those bodies. Equilibrium played an important role in explaining the behavior of physical systems understood mechanically. Some behavior was revealed to be an equilibrium condition; other behavior was understood as a variation from equilibrium. Implications for scientific explanation are then drawn from these historical considerations, specifically an alternative to reducing explanation to unification. Trying to cast mechanical explanations (of the kind considered here) as Kitcher-style argument schema fails to distinguish legitimate from spurious explanations. Consideration of the mechanical analogies lying behind the schema is required.

Jackie Sullivan (2007)

• University of Western Ontario (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind
• Dissertation: Reliability and Validity of Experiment in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

The concept of reliability has been defined traditionally by philosophers of science as a feature that an experiment has when it can be used to arrive at true descriptive or explanatory claims about phenomena. In contrast, philosophers of science typically take the concept of validity to correspond roughly to that of generalizability, which is defined as a feature that a descriptive or explanatory claim has when it is based on laboratory data but is applicable to phenomena beyond those effects under study in the laboratory. Philosophical accounts of experiment typically treat of the reliability of scientific experiment and the validity of descriptive or explanatory claims independently. On my account of experiment, however, these two issues are intimately linked. I show by appeal to case studies from the contemporary neurobiology of learning and memory that measures taken to guarantee the reliability of experiment often result in a decrease in the validity of those scientific claims that are made on the basis of such experiments and, furthermore, that strategies employed to increase validity often decrease reliability. Yet, since reliability and validity are both desirable goals of scientific experiments, and, on my account, competing aims, a tension ensues. I focus on two types of neurobiological experiments as case studies to illustrate this tension: (1) organism-level learning experiments and (2) synaptic-level plasticity experiments. I argue that the express commitment to the reliability of experimental processes in neurobiology has resulted in the invalidity of mechanistic claims about learning and plasticity made on the basis of data obtained from such experiments. The positive component of the dissertation consists in specific proposals that I offer as guidelines for resolving this tension in the context of experimental design.

Jim Tabery (2007)

• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Bioethics, History of Biology
• Dissertation: Causation in the Nature-Nurture Debate: The Case of Genotype-Environment Interaction

In the dissertation I attempt to resolve an aspect of the perennial nature-nurture debate. Despite the widely endorsed “interactionist credo”, the nature-nurture debate remains a quagmire of epistemological and methodological disputes over causation, explanation, and the concepts employed therein. Consider a typical nature-nurture question: Why do some individuals develop a complex trait such as depression, while others do not? This question incorporates an etiological query about the causal mechanisms responsible for the individual development of depression; it also incorporates an etiological query about the causes of variation responsible for individual differences in the occurrence of depression. Scientists in the developmental research tradition of biology investigate the causal mechanisms responsible for the individual development of traits; scientists in the biometric research tradition of biology investigate the causes of variation responsible for individual differences in traits. So what is the relationship between causal mechanisms and causes of variation, between individual development and individual differences, and between the developmental and biometric traditions?

Ingo Brigandt (2006)

• University of Alberta (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language
• Dissertation: A Theory of Conceptual Advance: Explaining Conceptual Change in Evolutionary, Molecular, and Evolutionary Developmental Biology

The theory of concepts advanced in the dissertation aims at accounting for a) how a concept makes successful practice possible, and b) how a scientific concept can be subject to rational change in the course of history. Traditional accounts in the philosophy of science have usually studied concepts in terms only of their reference; their concern is to establish a stability of reference in order to address the incommensurability problem. My discussion, in contrast, suggests that each scientific concept consists of three components of content: 1) reference, 2) inferential role, and 3) the epistemic goal pursued with a concept's use. I argue that in the course of history a concept can change in any of these three components, and that change in one component—including change of reference—can be accounted for as being rational relative to other components, in particular a concept's epistemic goal.

Francesca DiPoppa (2006)

• Texas Tech University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• History of Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: "God acts through the laws of his nature alone": From the Nihil ex Nihilo axiom to causation as expression in Spinoza's metaphysics

One of the most important concepts in Spinoza's metaphysics is that of causation. Much of the expansive scholarship on Spinoza, however, either takes causation for granted, or ascribes to Spinoza a model of causation that, for one reason or another, fails to account for specific instances of causation-such as the concept of cause of itself (causa sui). This work will offer a new interpretation of Spinoza's concept of causation. Starting from the "nothing comes from nothing" axiom and its consequences, the containment principle and the similarity principle (basically, the idea that what is in the effect must have been contained in the cause, and that the cause and the effect must have something in common) I will argue that Spinoza adopts what I call the expression-containment model of causation, a model that describes all causal interactions at the vertical and horizontal level (including causa sui, or self-cause). The model adopts the core notion of Neoplatonic emanationism, i.e. the idea that the effect is a necessary outpouring of the cause; however, Spinoza famously rejects transcendence and the possibility of created substances. God, the First Cause, causes immanently: everything that is caused is caused in God, as a mode of God. Starting from a discussion of the problems that Spinoza found in Cartesian philosophy, and of the Scholastic and Jewish positions on horizontal and vertical causation, my dissertation will follow the development of Spinoza's model of causation from his earliest work to his more mature Ethics. My work will also examine the relationship between Spinoza's elaboration of monism, the development of his model of causation, and his novel concept of essence (which for Spinoza coincides with a thing's causal power).

Abel Franco (2006)

• California State University, Northridge (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Descartes' theory of passions

Descartes not only had a theory of passions, but one that deserves a place among contemporary debates on emotions. The structure of this dissertation attempts to make explicit the unity of that theory. The study of the passions by the physician (who not only studies matter and motion but also human nature) [Chapter 2] appears to be the “foundations” (as he tells Chanut) of morals [Chapters 1 and 4] insofar as their main function [Chapter 3] is to dispose us to act in ways which directly affect our natural happiness. In other words, Descartes is in the Passions of the Soul (1649) climbing the very tree of philosophy he presented two years earlier in the Preface to French Edition of the Principles of Philosophy: the trunk (in this case a section of it: our nature) leads us to the highest of the three branches (morals) when we study human passions.

Doreen Fraser (2006)

• University of Waterloo (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, History of Science
• Dissertation: Haag's theorem and the interpretation of quantum field theories with interactions

Quantum field theory (QFT) is the physical framework that integrates quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity; it is the basis of many of our best physical theories. QFT's for interacting systems have yielded extraordinarily accurate predictions. Yet, in spite of unquestionable empirical success, the treatment of interactions in QFT raises serious issues for the foundations and interpretation of the theory. This dissertation takes Haag's theorem as a starting point for investigating these issues. It begins with a detailed exposition and analysis of different versions of Haag's theorem. The theorem is cast as a reductio ad absurdum of canonical QFT prior to renormalization. It is possible to adopt different strategies in response to this reductio: (1) renormalizing the canonical framework; (2) introducing a volume (i.e., long-distance) cutoff into the canonical framework; or (3) abandoning another assumption common to the canonical framework and Haag's theorem, which is the approach adopted by axiomatic and constructive field theorists. Haag's theorem does not entail that it is impossible to formulate a mathematically well-defined Hilbert space model for an interacting system on infinite, continuous space. Furthermore, Haag's theorem does not undermine the predictions of renormalized canonical QFT; canonical QFT with cutoffs and existing mathematically rigorous models for interactions are empirically equivalent to renormalized canonical QFT. The final two chapters explore the consequences of Haag's theorem for the interpretation of QFT with interactions. I argue that no mathematically rigorous model of QFT on infinite, continuous space admits an interpretation in terms of quanta (i.e., quantum particles). Furthermore, I contend that extant mathematically rigorous models for physically unrealistic interactions serve as a better guide to the ontology of QFT than either of the other two formulations of QFT. Consequently, according to QFT, quanta do not belong in our ontology of fundamental entities.

Greg Frost-Arnold (2006)

• Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• History of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Carnap, Tarski, and Quine's Year Together: Logic, Science and Mathematics

During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard: Russell, Tarski, Carnap, Quine, Hempel, and Goodman were all in residence. This group held both regular public meetings as well as private conversations. Carnap took detailed diction notes that give us an extensive record of the discussions at Harvard that year. Surprisingly, the most prominent question in these discussions is: if the number of physical items in the universe is finite (or possibly finite), what form should the logic and mathematics in science take? This question is closely connected to an abiding philosophical problem, one that is of central philosophical importance to the logical empiricists: what is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the natural, material realm? This problem continues to be central to analytic philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science. My dissertation focuses on three issues connected with this problem that dominate the Harvard discussions: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. I both reconstruct the lines of argument represented in Harvard discussions and relate them to contemporary treatments of these issues.

Francis Longworth (2006)

• Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (Research Fellow)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics
• Dissertation: Causation, Counterfactual Dependence and Pluralism

The principal concern of this dissertation is whether or not a conceptual analysis of our ordinary concept of causation can be provided. In chapters two and three I show that two of the most promising univocal accounts (the counterfactual theories of Hitchcock and Yablo) are subject to numerous counterexamples. In chapter four, I show that Hall's pluralistic theory of causation, according to which there are two concepts of causation, also faces a number of counterexamples. In chapter five, I sketch an alternative, broadly pluralistic theory of token causation, according to which causation is a cluster concept with a prototypical structure. This theory is able to evade the counterexamples that beset other theories and, in addition, offers an explanation of interesting features of the concept such the existence of borderline cases, and the fact that some instances of causation seem to be better examples of the concept than others.

David Miller (2006)

• Iowa State University(Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• History of Early Modern Philosophy, History of Science
• Dissertation: Representations of Space in Seventeenth Century Physics

The changing understanding of the universe that characterized the birth of modern science included a fundamental shift in the prevailing representation of space—the presupposed conceptual structure that allows one to intelligibly describe the spatial properties of physical phenomena. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the prevailing representation of space was spherical. Natural philosophers first assumed a spatial center, then specified meanings with reference to that center. Directions, for example, were described in relation to the center, and locations were specified by distance from the center. Through a series of attempts to solve problems first raised by the work of Copernicus, this Aristotelian, spherical framework was replaced by a rectilinear representation of space. By the end of the seventeenth century, descriptions were understood by reference to linear orientations, as parallel or oblique to a presupposed line, and locations were identified without reference to a privileged central point. This move to rectilinear representations of space enabled Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton to describe and explain the behavior of the physical world in the novel ways for which these men are justly famous, including their theories of gravitational attraction and inertia. In other words, the shift towards a rectilinear representation of space was essential to the fundamental reconception of the universe that gave rise to both modern physical theory and, at the same time, the linear way of experiencing the world essential to modern science.

Christian Wüthrich (2006)

• University of California, San Diego (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics
• Dissertation: Approaching the Planck Scale from a Generally Relativistic Point of View: A Philosophical Appraisal of Loop Quantum Gravity

My dissertation studies the foundations of loop quantum gravity, a candidate for a quantum theory of gravity based on classical general relativity. After an evaluation of the motivations for seeking a quantum theory of gravity, I embark upon an investigation of how loop quantum gravity codifies general relativity's main innovation, the so-called background independence, in a formalism suitable for quantization. This codification pulls asunder what has been joined together in general relativity: space and time. It is thus a central issue whether or not general relativity's four-dimensional structure can be retrieved in the alternative formalism. I argue that the rightful four-dimensional spacetime structure can only be partially retrieved at the classical level, while its retrieval at the quantum level is an open question. Next, I scrutinize pronouncements claiming that the "big-bang" singularity of classical cosmological models vanishes in quantum cosmology based on loop quantum gravity and conclude that these claims must be severely qualified. Finally, a scheme is developed of how the re-emergence of the smooth spacetime from the underlying discrete quantum structure could be understood.

Erik Angner (2005)

• George Mason University (Associate Professor)
• History and Philosophy of Social Science, Social and Political Philosophy
• Dissertation: Subjective Measures of Well-Being: A philosophical examination

Over the last couple of decades, as part of the rise of positive psychology, psychologists have given increasing amounts of attention to so-called subjective measures of well-being. These measures, which are supposed to represent the well-being of individuals and groups, are often presented as alternatives to more traditional economic ones for purposes of the articulation, implementation and evaluation of public policy. Unlike economic measures, which are typically based on data about income, market transactions and the like, subjective measures are based on answers to questions like: "Taking things all together, how would you say things are these days would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?" The aim of this dissertation is to explore issues in the philosophical foundations of subjective measures of well-being, with special emphasis on the manner in which the philosophical foundations of subjective measures differ from those of traditional economic measures. Moreover, the goal is to examine some arguments for and against these measures, and, in particular, arguments that purport to demonstrate the superiority of economic measures for purposes of public policy. My main thesis is that the claim that subjective measures of well-being cannot be shown to be inferior to economic measures quite as easily as some have suggested, but that they nevertheless are associated with serious problems, and that questions about the relative advantage of subjective and economic measures for purposes of public policy will depend on some fundamentally philosophical judgments, e.g. about the nature of well-being and the legitimate goals for public policy.

Megan Delehanty (2005)

• University of Calgary (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Empiricism and the Epistemic Status of Imaging Technologies

The starting point for this project was the question of how to understand the epistemic status of mathematized imaging technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET) and confocal microscopy. These sorts of instruments play an increasingly important role in virtually all areas of biology and medicine. Some of these technologies have been widely celebrated as having revolutionized various fields of studies while others have been the target of substantial criticism. Thus, it is essential that we be able to assess these sorts of technologies as methods of producing evidence. They differ from one another in many respects, but one feature they all have in common is the use of multiple layers of statistical and mathematical processing that are essential to data production. This feature alone means that they do not fit neatly into any standard empiricist account of evidence. Yet this failure to be accommodated by philosophical accounts of good evidence does not indicate a general inadequacy on their part since, by many measures, they very often produce very high quality evidence. In order to understand how they can do so, we must look more closely at old philosophical questions concerning the role of experience and observation in acquiring knowledge about the external world. Doing so leads us to a new, grounded version of empiricism. After distinguishing between a weaker and a stronger, anthropocentric version of empiricism, I argue that most contemporary accounts of observation are what I call benchmark strategies that, implicitly or explicitly, rely on the stronger version according to which human sense experience holds a place of unique privilege. They attempt to extend the bounds of observation iii and the epistemic privilege accorded to it—by establishing some type of relevant similarity to the benchmark of human perception. These accounts fail because they are unable to establish an epistemically motivated account of what relevant similarity consists of. The last best chance for any benchmark approach, and, indeed, for anthropocentric empiricism, is to supplement a benchmark strategy with a grounding strategy. Toward this end, I examine the Grounded Benchmark Criterion which defines relevant similarity to human perception in terms of the reliability-making features of human perception. This account, too, must fail due to our inability to specify these features given the current state of understanding of the human visual system. However, this failure reveals that it is reliability alone that is epistemically relevant, not any other sort of similarity to human perception. Current accounts of reliability suffer from a number of difficulties, so I develop a novel account of reliability that is based on the concept of granularity. My account of reliability in terms of a granularity match both provides the means to refine the weaker version of empiricism and allows us to establish when and why imaging technologies are reliable. Finally, I use this account of granularity in examining the importance of the fact that the output of imaging technologies usually is images.

Alan Love (2005)

• University of Minnesota (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Science, Biology
• Dissertation: Explaining Evolutionary Innovation and Novelty: A Historical and Philosophical Study of Biological Concepts

Explaining evolutionary novelties (such as feathers or neural crest cells) is a central item on the research agenda of evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo). Proponents of Evo-devo have claimed that the origin of innovation and novelty constitute a distinct research problem, ignored by evolutionary theory during the latter half of the 20th century, and that Evo-devo as a synthesis of biological disciplines is in a unique position to address this problem. In order to answer historical and philosophical questions attending these claims, two philosophical tools were developed. The first, conceptual clusters, captures the joint deployment of concepts in the offering of scientific explanations and allows for a novel definition of conceptual change. The second, problem agendas, captures the multifaceted nature of explanatory domains in biological science and their diachronic stability. The value of problem agendas as an analytical unit is illustrated through the examples of avian feather and flight origination. Historical research shows that explanations of innovation and novelty were not ignored. They were situated in disciplines such as comparative embryology, morphology, and paleontology (exemplified in the research of N.J. Berrill, D.D. Davis, and W.K. Gregory), which were overlooked because of a historiography emphasizing the relations between genetics and experimental embryology. This identified the origin of Evo-devo tools (developmental genetics) but missed the source of its problem agenda. The structure of developmental genetic explanations of innovations and novelties is compared and contrasted with those of other disciplinary approaches, past and present. Applying the tool of conceptual clusters to these explanations reveals a unique form of conceptual change over the past five decades: a change in the causal and evidential concepts appealed to in explanations. Specification of the criteria of explanatory adequacy for the problem agenda of innovation and novelty indicates that Evo-devo qua disciplinary synthesis requires more attention to the construction of integrated explanations from its constituent disciplines besides developmental genetics. A model for explanations integrating multiple disciplinary contributions is provided. The phylogenetic approach to philosophy of science utilized in this study is relevant to philosophical studies of other sciences and meets numerous criteria of adequacy for analyses of conceptual change.

Andrea Scarantino (2005)

• Georgia State University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Explicating Emotions

In the course of their long intellectual history, emotions have been identified with items as diverse as perceptions of bodily changes (feeling tradition), judgments (cognitivist tradition), behavioral predispositions (behaviorist tradition), biologically based solutions to fundamental life tasks (evolutionary tradition), and culturally specific social artifacts (social constructionist tradition). The first objective of my work is to put some order in the mare magnum of theories of emotions. I taxonomize them into families and explore the historical origin and current credentials of the arguments and intuitions supporting them. I then evaluate the methodology of past and present emotion theory, defending a bleak conclusion: a great many emotion theorists ask "What is an emotion?" without a clear understanding of what counts as getting the answer right. I argue that there are two ways of getting the answer right. One is to capture the conditions of application of the folk term "emotion" in ordinary language (Folk Emotion Project), and the other is to formulate a fruitful explication of it (Explicating Emotion Project). Once we get clear on the desiderata of these two projects, we realize that several long-running debates in emotion theory are motivated by methodological confusions. The constructive part of my work is devoted to formulating a new explication of emotion suitable for the theoretical purposes of scientific psychology. At the heart of the Urgency Management System (UMS) theory of emotions I propose is the idea that an "umotion" is a special type of superordinate system which instantiates and manages an urgent action tendency by coordinating the operation of a cluster of cognitive, perceptual and motoric subsystems. Crucially, such superordinate system has a proper function by virtue of which it acquires a special kind of intentionality I call pragmatic. I argue that "umotion" is sufficiently similar in use to "emotion" to count as explicating it, it has precise rules of application, and it accommodates a number of central and widely shared intuitions about the emotions. My hope is that future emotion research will demonstrate the heuristic fruitfulness of the "umotion" concept for the sciences of mind.

Armond Duwell (2004)

• University of Montana, Missoula (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Information Theory
• Dissertation: Foundations of Quantum Information Theory and Quantum Computation Theory

Physicists and philosophers have expressed great hope that quantum information theory will revolutionize our understanding of quantum theory. The first part of my dissertation is devoted to clarifying and criticizing various notions of quantum information, particularly those attributable to Jozsa and also Deutsch and Hayden. My work suggests that no new concept of information is needed and the Shannon information theory works perfectly well for quantum mechanical systems.

Uljana Feest (2003)

• University of Hanover (Professor) -->
• Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences
• Dissertation: Operationism, Experimentation, and Concept Formation

I provide a historical and philosophical analysis of the doctrine of operationism, which emerged in American psychology in the 1930s. While operationism is frequently characterized as a semantic thesis (which demands that concepts be defined by means of measurement operations), I argue that it is better understood as a methodological strategy, which urges that experimental investigation. I present three historical case studies of the work of early proponents of operationism and show that all of them were impressed by behaviorist critiques of traditional mentalism and introspectivism, while still wanting to investigate some of the phenomena of traditional psychology (consciousness, purpose, motivation). I show that when these psychologists used “operational definitions”, they posited the existence of particular psychological phenomena and treated certain experimental data – by stipulation – as indicative of those phenomena. However, they viewed these stipulative empirical definitions as neither a priori true, nor as unrevisable. While such stipulative definitions have the function of getting empirical research about a phenomenon “off the ground”, they clearly don't provide sufficient evidence for the existence of the phenomenon. In the philosophical part of my dissertation, I raise the epistemological question of what it would take to provide such evidence, relating this question to recent debates in the philosophy of experimentation. I argue that evidence for the existence of a given phenomenon is produced as part of testing descriptive hypotheses about the phenomenon. Given how many background assumptions have to be made in order to test a hypothesis about a phenomenon, I raise the question of whether claims about the existence of psychological phenomena are underdetermined by data. I argue that they are not. Lastly, I present an analysis of the scientific notion of an experimental artifact, and introduce the notion of an “artifactual belief”, i.e. an experimentally well confirmed belief that later turns out to be false, when one or more of the background assumptions (relative to which the belief was confirmed) turn out to be false.

Gualtiero Piccinini (2003)

• University of Missouri - St. Louis (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Mind
• Dissertation: Computations and Computers in the Sciences of Mind and Brain

Computationalism says that brains are computing mechanisms, that is, mechanisms that perform computations. At present, there is no consensus on how to formulate computationalism precisely or adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, or between different versions of computationalism. An important reason for the current impasse is the lack of a satisfactory philosophical account of computing mechanisms. The main goal of this dissertation is to offer such an account. I also believe that the history of computationalism sheds light on the current debate. By tracing different versions of computationalism to their common historical origin, we can see how the current divisions originated and understand their motivation. Reconstructing debates over computationalism in the context of their own intellectual history can contribute to philosophical progress on the relation between brains and computing mechanisms and help determine how brains and computing mechanisms are alike, and how they differ. Accordingly, my dissertation is divided into a historical part, which traces the early history of computationalism up to 1946, and a philosophical part, which offers an account of computing mechanisms.

Wendy Parker (2003)

• University of Durham (Reader) [email protected] -->
• Modeling and Simulation, Science and Public Policy, Environmental Philosophy
• Dissertation: Computer Modeling in Climate Science: Experiment, Explanation, Pluralism

Computer simulation modeling is an important part of contemporary scientific practice but has not yet received much attention from philosophers. The present project helps to fill this lacuna in the philosophical literature by addressing three questions that arise in the context of computer simulation of Earth's climate. (1) Computer simulation experimentation commonly is viewed as a suspect methodology, in contrast to the trusted mainstay of material experimentation. Are the results of computer simulation experiments somehow deeply problematic in ways that the results of material experiments are not? I argue against categorical skepticism toward the results of computer simulation experiments by revealing important parallels in the epistemologies of material and computer simulation experimentation. (2) It has often been remarked that simple computer simulation models—but not complex ones—contribute substantially to our understanding of the atmosphere and climate system. Is this view of the relative contribution of simply and complex models tenable? Io show that both simple and complex climate models can promote scientific understanding and argue that the apparent contribution of simple models depends upon whether a causal or deductive account of scientific understanding is adopted. (3) When two incompatible scientific theories are under consideration, they typically are viewed as competitors, and we seek evidence that refutes at least one of the theories. In the study of climate change, however, logically incompatible computer simulation models are accepted as complementary resources for investigating future climate. How can we make sense of this use of incompatible models? I show that a collection of incompatible models climate models persists in part because of difficulties faced in evaluating and comparing climate models. I then discuss the rationale for using these incompatible models together and argue that this climate model pluralism has both competitive and integrative components.

Chris Smeenk (2002)

• University of Western Ontario (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: Approaching the Absolute Zero of Time: Theory Development in Early Universe Cosmology

This dissertation gives an original account of the historical development of modern cosmology along with a philosophical assessment of related methodological and foundational issues. After briefly reviewing the groundbreaking work by Einstein and others, I turn to the development of early universe cosmology following the discovery of the microwave background radiation in 1965. This discovery encouraged consolidation and refinement of the big bang model, but cosmologists also noted that cosmological models could accomodate observations only at the cost of several "unnatural" assumptions regarding the initial state. I describe various attempts to eliminate initial conditions in the late 60s and early 70s, leading up to the idea that came to dominate the field: inflationary cosmology. I discuss the pre-history of inflationary cosmology and the early development of the idea, including the account of structure formation and the introduction of the "inflaton" field. The second part of my thesis focuses on methodological issues in cosmology, opening with a discussion of three principles and their role in cosmology: the cosmological principle, indifference principle, and anthropic principle. I assess appeals to explanatory adequacy as grounds for theory choice in cosmology, and close with a discussion of confirmation theory and the issue of novelty in relation to cosmological theories.

Daniel Steel (2002)

• Michigan State University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Causality and Confirmation; Biological and Social Sciences
• Dissertation: Mechanisms and Interfering Factors: Dealing with Heterogeneity in the Biological and Social Sciences

The biological and social sciences both deal with populations that are heterogeneous with regard to important causes of interest, in the sense that the same cause often exerts very different effects upon distinct members of the population. For instance, welfare- to-work programs are likely to have different effects on the economic prospects of trainees depending on such variables as education, prior work experience, and so forth. Moreover, it is rarely the case in biology or social science that all such complicating variables are known and can be measured. In such circumstances, generalizations about the effect of a factor in a given population average over these differences, and hence take on a probabilistic character. Consequently, a causal generalization that holds with respect to a heterogeneous population as a whole may not hold for a given sub-population, a fact which raises a variety of difficulties for explanation and prediction. The overarching theme of the dissertation is that knowing how a cause produces its effect is the key to knowing when a particular causal relationship holds and when it does not. More specifically, the proposal is the following. Suppose that X is the cause of Y in the population P. Then there is a mechanism, or mechanisms, present among at least some of the members of P through which X influences Y. So if we know the mechanism and the kinds of things that can interfere with it, then we are in a much better position to say when the causal generalization will hold and when it will not. This intuitive idea has been endorsed by several philosophers; however, what has been lacking is a systematic exploration of the proposal and its consequences. That is what I aim to provide. The approach to the heterogeneity problem is developed in the context of an example drawn from biomedical science, namely, research into the causal mechanism by which HIV attacks the human immune system. Moreover, I argue that my approach to the problem of heterogeneity sheds new light on some familiar philosophical issues that are relevant to the biological and social sciences, namely, ceteris paribus laws and methodological holism versus methodological individualism.

Chris Martin (2001)

• Left the field
• Philosophy of Physics, Gauge Theories
• Dissertation: Gauging Gauge: Remarks on the Conceptual Foundations of Gauge Symmetry

Of all the concepts of modern physics, there are few that have the sort of powerful, sometimes mysterious, and often awe-inspiring rhetoric surrounding them as has the concept of local gauge symmetry. The common understanding today is that all fundamental interactions in nature are described by so-called gauge theories. These theories, far from being just any sort of physical theory are taken to result from the tsrict dictates of principles of local gauge symmetry—gauge symmetry principles. The success—experimental, theoretical and other wise—of theories based on local symmetry principles has given rise to the received view of local symmetry principles as deeply fundamental, as literally “dictating” or “necessitating” the very shape of fundamental physics. The current work seeks to make some headway towards elucidating this view by considering the general issue of the physical content of local symmetry principles in their historical and theoretical contexts. There are two parts to the dissertation: a historical part and a more “philosophical” part. In the first, historical part, I provide a brief genealogy of gauge theories, looking at some of the seminal works in the birth and development of gauge theories. My chief claim here is about what one does not find. Despite the modern rhetoric, the history of gauge field theories does not evidence loaded arguments from (a priori) local symmetry principles or even the need for ascriptions of any deep physical significance to these principles. The history evidences that the ascendancy of gauge field theories rests quite squarely on the heuristic value of local gauge symmetry principles. In the philosophical component of the dissertation I turn to an analysis of the gauge argument, the canonical means of cashing out the physical content of gauge symmetry principle. I warn against a (common) literal reading of the argument. As I discuss, the argument must be afforded a fairly heuristic (even if historically-based) reading. Claims to the effect that the argument reflects the “logic of nature” must, for many reasons that I discuss, be taken with a grain of salt. Finally, I highlight how the “received view” of gauge symmetry—which takes it that gauge symmetry transformations are merely non-physical, formal changes of description—gives rise to a tension between the “profundity of gauge symmetry” and “the redundancy of gauge symmetry”. I consider various ways one might address this tension. I conclude that one is hard pressed to do any better than a “minimalist view” which takes it that the physical import of gauge symmetry lies in its historically based heuristic utility. While there are less minimalist views of the physical content to be ascribed to gauge symmetry principles, it is clear that neither the history nor the physics obliges us to make such ascriptions.

Andrew Backe (2000)

• City University of Hong Kong (Visiting Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Mind, American Pragmatism
• Dissertation: The Divided Psychology of John Dewey

This dissertation examines the extent to which John Dewey's psychology was a form of behaviorism, and, in doing so, considers how metaphysical commitments influenced psychological theories at the turn of the century. In his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic , Dewey described his psychology as a science not of states of consciousness, but of behavior. Specifically, Dewey argued that conscious states can be assimilated to modes of behavior that help the individual adapt to a situation of conflict. Hence, the role of psychology, Dewey argued, is to provide a natural history of the conditions under which a particular behavioral mode emerges. Based on an analysis of a number of Dewey's major works written during the period of 1884 to 1916, I claim that there is an underlying metaphysical intuition in Dewey's views that prevents a behavioristic interpretation of his psychology. This intuition, I argue, stems from Dewey's absolute idealist philosophy of the mid 1880s. The intuition raises the concern that, if psychologists permit a transition from one psychological state to another to be described in terms of a causal succession of discrete events, then there is no way that the transition can be held together in a relational complex. As applied to psychology by Dewey, the intuition rejected treating any psychological phenomenon as constituted of separate existences, regardless of whether the phenomenon is defined in terms of conscious or behavioral events. Instead, the intuition presupposed that psychological events are unified in a special kind of relation in which events merge and are, in a mystical sense, identical. I maintain that Dewey's intuition regarding psychological causation served as the basis for his concept of coordination, which Dewey set out in his criticism of the reflex arc concept in the context of the Baldwin-Titchener reaction-time controversy. According to my account, Dewey's coordination concept was at odds with the behaviorists' unit of analysis, which explicitly divided any psychological phenomenon into separate existences of stimulus and response. I consider the broader implications of Dewey's metaphysical intuition through a discussion of different types of causal explanation that emerged in psychology in the early 20th century.

Benoit Desjardins (1999)

• Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (Assistant Professor of Radiology)
• Causality, Statistical Algorithms
• Dissertation: On the Theoretical Limits to Reliable Causal Inference

One of the most central problems in scientific research is the search for explanations of some aspect of nature for which empirical data is available. One seeks to identify the causal processes explaining the data, in the form of a model of the aspect of nature under study. Although traditional statistical approaches are excellent for finding statistical dependencies in a body of empirical data, they prove inadequate at finding the causal structure in the data. New graphical algorithmic approaches have been proposed to automatically discover the causal structure in the data. Based on strong connections between graph theoretic properties and statistical aspects of causal influences, fundamental assumptions about the data can be used to infer a graphical structure, which is used to construct models describing the exact causal relations in the data. If the data contain correlated errors, latent variables must be introduced to explain the causal structure in the data. There is usually a large set of equivalent causal models with latent variables, representing competing alternatives, which entail similar statistical dependency relations. The central problem in this dissertation is the study of the theoretical limits to reliable causal inference. Given a body of statistical distribution information on a finite set of variables, we seek to characterize the set of all causal models satisfying this distribution. Current approaches only characterize the set of models which satisfy limited properties of this distribution, notably its relations of probabilistic conditional independence. Such models are semi-Markov equivalent. Some of these models might however not satisfy other properties of the distribution, which cannot be expressed as simple conditional independence relations on marginal distributions. We seek to go beyond semi-Markov equivalence. To do so, we first formally characterize the variation in graphical structure within a semi-Markov equivalence class of models. We then determine possible consequences of this variation as either experimentally testable features of models, or as testable features of marginal distributions.

Elizabeth Paris (1999)

• History of Particle Physics
• Dissertation: Ringing in the New Physics: The Politics and Technology of Electron Colliders in the United States, 1956-1972

The “November Revolution” of 1974 and the experiments that followed consolidated the place of the Standard Model in modern particle physics. Much of the evidence on which these conclusions depended was generated by a new type of tool: colliding beam storage rings, which had been considered physically unfeasible twenty years earlier. In 1956 a young experimentalist named Gerry O'Neill dedicated himself to demonstrating that such an apparatus could do useful physics. The storage ring movement encountered numerous obstacles before generating one of the standard machines for high energy research. In fact, it wasn't until 1970 that the U.S. finally broke ground on its first electron-positron collider. Drawing extensively on archival sources and supplementing them with the personal accounts of many of the individuals who took part, Ringing in the New Physics examines this instance of post-World War II techno-science and the new social, political and scientific tensions that characterize it. The motivations are twofold: first, that the chronicle of storage rings may take its place beside mathematical group theory, computer simulations, magnetic spark chambers, and the like as an important contributor to a view of matter and energy which has been the dominant model for the last twenty-five years. In addition, the account provides a case study for the integration of the personal, professional, institutional, and material worlds when examining an episode in the history or sociology of twentieth century science. The story behind the technological development of storage rings holds fascinating insights into the relationship between theory and experiment, collaboration and competition in the physics community, the way scientists obtain funding and their responsibilities to it, and the very nature of what constitutes successful science in the post-World War II era.

Tom Seppalainen (1999)

• Portland State University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Visual Perception and Cognition, Metaphysics
• Dissertation: The Problematic Nature of Experiments in Color Science

The so-called opponent process theory of color vision has played a prominent role in recent philosophical debates on color. Several philosophers have argued that this theory can be used to reduce color experiences to properties of neural cells. I will refute this argument by displaying some of the problematic features of the experimental inference present in color science. Along the way I will explicate some of the methodological strategies employed by vision scientists to accomplish integration across the mind-body boundary. At worst, the integration follows the looks-like methodology where effects resemble their causes. The modern textbook model for human color vision consists of three hypothetical color channels, red-green, blue-yellow, and white-black. These are assumed to be directly responsible for their respective color sensations. The hue channels are opponent in that light stimulation can cause only one of the respective hue sensations. The channels are also seen as consisting of opponent neural cells. The cells and the channels are claimed to have similar response properties. In my work, I reconstruct some of the critical experiments underwriting the textbook model. The centerpiece is an analysis of Hurvich and Jameson's color cancellation experiment. I demonstrate that the experiment cannot rule out the contradictory alternative hypothesis for opponent channels without making question-begging assumptions. In order to accomplish this, I clarify the theorizing of Hurvich and Jameson's predecessor, Ewald Hering, as well as the classic trichromatic theory. I demonstrate that currently no converging evidence from neurophysiology exists for the opponent process theory. I show that the results from De Valois' studies of single cells are theory-laden. The classification into cell types assumes the textbook model. Since the textbook model is an artifact of experimental pseudo-convergence both claims for a reductive and a causal explanation of color experiences are premature.

Jonathan Bain (1998)

• Polytechnic Institute of NYU (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Spacetime, Scientific Realism, Philosophy of Quantum Field Theory
• Dissertation: Representations of Spacetime: Formalism and Ontological Commitment

This dissertation consists of two parts. The first is on the relation between formalism and ontological commitment in the context of theories of spacetime, and the second is on scientific realism. The first part begins with a look at how the substantivalist/ relationist debate over the ontological status of spacetime has been influenced by a particular mathematical formalism, that of tensor analysis on differential manifolds (TADM). This formalism has motivated the substantivalist position known as manifold substantivalism. Chapter 1 focuses on the hole argument which maintains that manifold substantivalism is incompatible with determinism. I claim that the realist motivations underlying manifold substantivalism can be upheld, and the hole argument avoided, by adopting structural realism with respect to spacetime. In this context, this is the claim that it is the structure that spacetime points enter into that warrants belief and not the points themselves. In Chapter 2, an elimination principle is defined by means of which a distinction can be made between surplus structure and essential structure with respect to formulations of a theory in two distinct mathematical formulations and some prior ontological commitments. This principle is then used to demonstrate that manifold points may be considered surplus structure in the formulation of field theories. This suggests that, if we are disposed to read field theories literally, then, at most, it should be the essential structure common to all alternative formulations of such theories that should be taken literally. I also investigate how the adoption of alternative formalisms informs other issues in the philosophy of spacetime. Chapter 3 offers a realist position which takes a semantic moral from the preceding investigation and an epistemic moral from work done on reliability. The semantic moral advises us to read only the essential structure of our theories literally. The epistemic moral shows us that such structure is robust under theory change, given an adequate reliabilist notion of epistemic warrant. I call the realist position that subscribes to these morals structural realism and attempt to demonstrate that it is immune to the semantic and epistemic versions of the underdetermination argument posed by the anti-realist.

Carl Craver (1998)

• Washington University in St. Louis (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Neural Mechanisms: On the Structure, Function, and Development of Theories in Neurobiology

Reference to mechanisms is virtually ubiquitous in science and its philosophy. Yet, the concept of a mechanism remains largely unanalyzed; So too for its possible applications in thinking about scientific explanation, experimental practice, and theory structure. This dissertation investigates these issues in the context of contemporary neurobiology. The theories of neurobiology are hierarchically organized descriptions of mechanisms that explain functions. Mechanisms are the coordinated activities of entities by virtue of which that function is performed. Since the activities composing mechanisms are often susceptible to mechanical redescription themselves, theories in neurobiology have a characteristic hierarchical structure. The activities of entities at one level are the sub-activities of those at a higher level. This hierarchy reveals a fundamental symmetry of functional and mechanical descriptions. Functions are privileged activities of entities; they are privileged because they constitute a stage in some higher-level (+1) mechanism. The privileged activities of entities, in turn, are explained by detailing the stages of activity in the lower-level ($-$1) mechanism. Functional and mechanical descriptions are different tools for situating activities, properties, and entities into a hierarchy of activities. They are not competing kinds of description. Experimental techniques for testing such descriptions reflect this symmetry. Philosophical discussions of inter-level explanatory relationships have traditionally been framed by reference to inter-theoretic reduction models. The representational strictures of first order predicate calculus and the epistemological strictures logical empiricism combine in this reduction model to focus attention upon issues of identity and deriveability; these are entirely peripheral to the explanatory aims of mechanical ($-$1) explanation. Mechanical explanation is causal. Derivational models of explanation do not adequately reflect the importance of activities in rendering phenomena intelligible. Activities are kinds of change. 'Bonding,' 'diffusing,' 'transcribing,' 'opening,' and 'attracting' all describe different kinds of transformation. Salmon's modified process theory (1998) is helpful in understanding the role of entities and properties in causal interactions; but it ultimately makes no room for kinds of change in the explanatory cupboard. We make change intelligible by identifying and characterizing its different kinds and relating these to activities that are taken to be fundamental for a science at a time.

Heather Douglas (1998)

• Philosophy of Science, Environmental Philosophy, Science and Public Policy
• Dissertation: The Use of Science in Policy-Making: A Study of Values in Dioxin Science

The risk regulation process has been traditionally conceived as having two components: a consultation of the experts concerning the magnitude of risk (risk assessment) and a negotiated decision on whether and how to reduce that risk (risk management). The first component is generally thought to be free of the contentious value judgments that often characterize the second component. In examining the recent controversy over dioxin regulation, I argue that the first component is not value-free. I review three areas of science important to dioxin regulation: epidemiological studies, laboratory animal studies, and biochemical studies. I show how problems of interpretation arise for each area of science that prevent a clear-cut answer to the question: what dose of dioxins is safe for humans? Because of significant uncertainties in how to interpret these studies, there is significant risk that one will err in the interpretation. In order to judge what risk of error to accept, one needs to consider and weigh the consequences of one's judgments, whether epistemic or non-epistemic. Weighing non-epistemic consequences requires the use of non-epistemic values. Thus, non-epistemic values, or the kind that are important in risk management, have an important and legitimate role to play in the judgments required to perform and interpret the dioxin studies. The risk assessment component of the risk regulation process (or any similar consultation of the scientific experts) cannot be claimed to be value-free and the process must be altered to accommodate a value-laden science.

Mark Holowchak (1998)

• Rider University (Adjunct Assistant Professor)
• Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy of Sport
• Dissertation: The Problem of Differentiation and the Science of Dreams in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

Dreams played a vital role in Graeco-Roman antiquity at all levels of society. Interpreters of prophetic dreams thrived at marketplaces and at religious festivals. Physicians used dreams to facilitate diagnosis. Philosophers talked of dreams revealing ne's moral character and emotional dispositions. Many who studied dreams developed rich and elaborate accounts of the various sorts of dreams and their formation. All of this bespeaks a science of dreams in antiquity. Did these ancients, by a thorough examination of the content of dreams and their attendant circumstances, develop criteria for distinguishing the kinds or functions of dreams and, if so, were these criteria empirically reliable? I attempt to answer these questions chiefly through an evaluation of ancient Graeco-Roman 'oneirology' (the science of dreams) in the works of eight different Graeco-Roman oneirologists, especially philosophers and natural scientists, from Homer to Synesius. First, I argue that Homer's famous reference to two gates of dreams led subsequent thinkers to believe in prophetic and nonprophetic dreams. Additionally, the two gates engendered a practical approach to dreams that had a lasting impact on Graeco-Roman antiquity, especially through interpreters of prophetic dreams. Yet, as interpreters of dreams prospered, critics challenged the validity of their art. Ultimately, I argue that the interpreters' responses to their critics were unavailing. Moreover, the emergence of the belief in an agentive soul around the fifth century B.C. paved the way for psychophysiological accounts of dreams. Philosophers and physicians thereafter begin to explore nonprophetic meanings of dreams--like moral, psychological, or somatic meanings. Some philosophers rejected the notion of prophecy through dreams altogether, while many essayed to ground prophetic dreams by giving them psychophysiological explanations like other dreams. In general, those oneirologists who tried to give all dreams a psychophysiological explanation bypassed the problem of differentiating dreams by positing, strictly speaking, only one kind of dream—though committing themselves to a plurality of functions for them. In summary, I argue that the ancient Graeco-Roman oneirology—as a thorough admixture of the practical, Homeric approach to dreams and the psychogenetic approach—was an inseparable blend of literary fancy and respectable science.

David Sandborg (1998)

• Philosophy of Mathematics, Explanation
• Dissertation: Explanation in Mathematical Practice

Philosophers have paid little attention to mathematical explanations (Mark Steiner and Philip Kitcher are notable exceptions). I present a variety of examples of mathematical explanation and examine two cases in detail. I argue that mathematical explanations have important implications for the philosophy of mathematics and of science. The first case study compares many proofs of Pick's theorem, a simple geometrical result. Though a simple proof surfaces to establish the result, some of the proofs explain the result better than others. The second case study comes from George Polya's Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning . He gives a proof that, while entirely satisfactory in establishing its conclusion, is insufficiently explanatory. To provide a better explanation, he supplements the proof with additional exposition. These case studies illustrate at least two distinct explanatory virtues, and suggest there may be more. First, an explanatory improvement occurs when a sense of 'arbitrariness' is reduced in the proofs. Proofs more explanatory in this way place greater restrictions on the steps that can be used to reach the conclusion. Second, explanatoriness is judged by directness of representation. More explanatory proofs allow one to ascribe geometric meaning to the terms of Pick's formula as they arise. I trace the lack of attention to mathematical explanations to an implicit assumption, justificationism, that only justificational aspects of mathematical reasoning are epistemically important. I propose an anti-justificationist epistemic position, the epistemic virtues view, which holds that justificational virtues, while important, are not the only ones of philosophical interest in mathematics. Indeed, explanatory benefits are rarely justificational. I show how the epistemic virtues view and the recognition of mathematical explanation can shed new light on philosophical debates. Mathematical explanations have consequences for philosophy of science as well. I show that mathematical explanations provide serious challenges to any theory, such as Bas van Fraassen's, that considers explanations to be fundamentally answers to why-questions. I urge a closer interaction between philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science; both will be needed for a fuller understanding of mathematical explanation.

Marta Spranzi-Zuber (1998)

• Université de Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines
• Ancient and Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: The tradition of Aristotle's Topics and Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems : Dialectic, dialogue, and the demonstration of the Earth's motion

In this work I show that Galileo Galilei provided a "dialectical demonstration" of the Earth's motion in the Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, in the sense outlined in Aristotle's Topics . In order to understand what this demonstration consists of, I reconstructed the tradition of dialectic from Aristotle to the Renaissance, analyzing its developments with Cicero, Boethius, the Middle Ages up to the 16th century. As far as Renaissance developments are concerned, I singled out three domains where the tradition of Aristotle's Topics was particularly important: "pure" Aristotelianism, the creation of a new dialectic modelled on rhetoric, and finally the theories of the dialogue form. In each case I focused on a particular work which is not only interesting in its own right, but also represents well one of these developments: Agostino Nifo's commentary to Aristotle's Topics , Rudolph Agricola's De inventione dialectica , and Carlo Sigonio's De dialogo liber , respectively. As far as Galileo is concerned, I focused on the first Day of the Dialogue where Galileo proves that the Earth is a planet, as an example of dialectical strategy embodied in a literary dialogue. Galileo's dialectical demonstration of the Earth's motion can be identified neither with rhetorical persuasion nor with scientific (empirical) demonstration. Rather, it is a strategy of inquiry and proof which is crucially dependent on an exchange between two disputants through a question and answer format. A dialectical demonstration does not create consensus on a given thesis, nor does it demonstrate it conclusively, but yields corroborated and justified knowledge, albeit provisional and contextual, namely open to revision, and dependent upon the reasoned assent of a qualified opponent.

Andrea Woody (1998)

• University of Washington (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, History of Science, and Feminist Perspectives within Philosophy
• Dissertation: Early twentieth century theories of chemical bonding: Explanation, representation, and theory development

This dissertation examines how we may meaningfully attribute explanatoriness to theoretical structures and in turn, how such attributions can, and should, influence theory assessment generally. In this context, I argue against 'inference to the best explanation' accounts of explanatory power as well as the deflationary 'answers to why questions' proposal of van Fraassen. Though my analysis emphases the role of unification in explanation, I demonstrate ways in which Kitcher's particular account is insufficient. The suggested alternative takes explanatory power to be a measure of theory intelligibility; thus, its value resides in making theories easy to probe, communicate, and ultimately modify. An underlying goal of the discussion is to demonstrate, even for a small set of examples, that not all components of rational assessment distill down, in one way or another, to evaluations of a theory's empirical adequacy. Instead, the merits of explanatory structures are argued to be forward-looking, meaning that they hold the potential to contribute significantly to theory development either by providing directives for theoretical modification, perhaps indirectly by guiding empirical investigation, or by facilitating various means of inferential error control. The dissertation's central case study concerns the development of twentieth century quantum mechanical theories of the chemical bond, provocative territory because of the diversity of models and representations developed for incorporating a computationally challenging, and potentially intractable, fundamental theory into pre-existing chemical theory and practice. Explicit mathematical techniques as well as various graphical, schematic, and diagrammatic models are examined in some detail. Ultimately these theoretical structures serve as the landscape for exploring, in a preliminary fashion, the influence of representational format on inferential capacities generally. Although the connection between representation and explanation is seldom emphasized, this dissertation offers evidence of the high cost of such neglect.

Rachel Ankeny (1997)

• The University of Adelaide (Associate Dean(Research) and Deputy Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts)
• [email protected]
• History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences; Bioethics
• Dissertation: The conqueror worm: An historical and philosophical examination of the use of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism

This study focuses on the concept of a "model organism" in the biomedical sciences through an historical and philosophical exploration of research with the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans . I examine the conceptualization of a model organism in the case of the choice and early use of C. elegans in 1960s, showing that a rich context existed within which the organism was selected as the focus for a fledging research program in molecular biology. I argue that the choice of C. elegans was obvious rather than highly inventive within this context, and that the success of the "worm project" depends not only on organismal choice but on the conceptual and institutional frameworks within which the project was pursued.

Jonathan Simon (1997)

• Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
• History of Chemistry
• Dissertation: The alchemy of identity: Pharmacy and the chemical revolution, 1777-1809

This dissertation reassesses the chemical revolution that occurred in eighteenth-century France from the pharmacists' perspective. I use French pharmacy to place the event in historical context, understanding this revolution as constituted by more than simply a change in theory. The consolidation of a new scientific community of chemists, professing an importantly changed science of chemistry, is elucidated by examining the changing relationship between the communities of pharmacists and chemists across the eighteenth century. This entails an understanding of the chemical revolution that takes into account social and institutional transformations as well as theoretical change, and hence incorporates the reforms brought about during and after the French Revolution. First, I examine the social rise of philosophical chemistry as a scientific pursuit increasingly independent of its practical applications, including pharmacy, and then relate this to the theoretical change brought about by Lavoisier and his oxygenic system of chemistry. Then, I consider the institutional reforms that placed Lavoisier's chemistry in French higher education. During the 17th century, chemistry was intimately entwined with pharmacy, and chemical manipulations were primarily intended to enhance the medicinal properties of a substance. An independent philosophical chemistry gained ground during the 18th century, and this development culminated in the work of Lavoisier who cast pharmacy out of his chemistry altogether. Fourcroy, one of Lavoisier's disciples, brought the new chemistry to the pharmacists in both his textbooks and his legislation. Under Napoleon, Fourcroy instituted a new system of education for pharmacists that placed a premium on formal scientific education. Fourcroy's successors, Vauquelin and Bouillon-Lagrange, taught the new chemistry to the elite pharmacists in the School of Pharmacy in Paris. These pharmacists also developed new analytical techniques that combined the aims of the new chemistry with traditional pharmaceutical extractive practices. The scientific pharmacist (for example, Pelletier and Caventou) was created, who, although a respected member of the community of pharmacists, helped to define the new chemistry precisely by not being a true chemist.

Aristidis Arageorgis (1996)

• National Technical University of Athens (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Quantum Field Theory
• Dissertation: Fields, Particles, and Curvature: Foundation and Philosophical Aspects of Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime

The physical, mathematical, and philosophical foundations of the quantum theory of free Bose fields in fixed general relativistic spacetimes are examined. It is argued that the theory is logically and mathematically consistent whereas semiclassical prescriptions for incorporating the back-reaction of the quantum field on the geometry lead to inconsistencies. Still, the relations and heuristic value of the semiclassical approach to canonical and covariant schemes of quantum gravity-plus-matter are assessed. Both conventional and rigorous formulations of the theory and of its principal predictions, cosmological particle creation and horizon radiation, are expounded and compared. Special attention is devoted to spacetime properties needed for the existence or uniqueness of the relevant theoretical elements (algebra of observables, Hilbert space representation(s), renormalization of the stress tensor). The emergence of unitarily inequivalent representations in a single dynamical context is used as motivation for the introduction of the abstract $/rm C/sp[/*]$-algebraic axiomatic formalism. The operationalist and conventionalist claims of the original abstract algebraic program are criticized in favor of its tempered outgrowth, local quantum physics. The interpretation of the theory as a wave mechanics of classical field configurations, deriving from the Schrodinger representations of the abstract algebra, is discussed and is found superior, at least on the level of analogy, to particle or harmonic oscillator interpretations. Further, it is argued that the various detector results and the Fulling nonuniqueness problem do not undermine the particle concept in the ways commonly claimed. In particular, arguments are offered against the attribution of particle status to the Rindler quanta, against the physical realizability of the Rindler vacuum, and against the more general notion of observer-dependence as to the definition of 'particle' or 'vacuum'. However, the question of the ontological status of particles is raised in terms of the consistency of quantum field theory with non-reductive realism about particles, the latter being conceived as entities exhibiting attributes of discreteness and localizability. Two arguments against non-reductive realism about particles, one from axiomatic algebraic local quantum theory in Minkowski spacetime and one from quantum field theory in curved spacetime, are developed.

Keith Parsons (1996)

• University of Houston, Clear Lake (Professor)
• Paleontology, Realism-Constructivism
• Dissertation: Wrongheaded science? Rationality, constructivism, and dinosaurs

Constructivism is the claim that the "facts" of science are "constructs" created by scientific communities in accordance with the linguistic and social practices of that community. In other words, constructivists argue that scientific truth is nothing more than what scientific communities agree upon. Further, they hold that such agreement is reached through a process of negotiation in which "nonscientific" factors, e.g. appeals to vested social interests, intimidation, etc., play a more important role than traditionally "rationa"' or "scientific" considerations. This dissertation examines and evaluates the arguments of three major constructivists: Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, and Harry Collins. The first three chapters are extended case studies of episodes in the history of dinosaur paleontology. The first episodes examined are two controversies that arose over the early reconstructions of sauropods. The more important dispute involved the decision by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to mount a head on their Apatosaurus specimen which, after 45 years, it came to regard as the wrong head. The second case study involves the controversy over Robert Bakker's dinosaur endothermy hypothesis. Finally, I examine David Raup's role in the debate over the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinctions. In particular, I evaluate certain Kuhnian themes about theory choice by examining Raup's 'conversion' to a new hypothesis. In the last three chapters I critically examine constructivist claims in the light of the case studies. The thesis of Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life is clarified; I argue that each author has a somewhat different interpretation of that thesis. Both interpretations are criticized. The constructivist arguments of Harry Collins' Changing Order are also examined and rejected. I conclude that a constructivist view of science is not preferable to a more traditionally rationalist account. A concluding meditation reflects on the role of the history of science in motivating constructivist positions.

Ofer Gal (1996)

• University of Sydney (Associate Professor)
• Early Modern History and Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Producing knowledge: Robert Hooke

This work is an argument for the notion of knowledge production. It is an attempt at an epistemological and historiographic position which treats all facets and modes of knowledge as products of human practices, a position developed and demonstrated through a reconstruction of two defining episodes in the scientific career of Robert Hooke (1635-1703): the composition of his Programme for explaining planetary orbits as inertial motion bent by centripetal force, and his development of the spring law in relation to his invention of the spring watch. The revival of interest in the history of experimental and technological knowledge has accorded Hooke much more attention than before. However, dependent on the conception of knowledge as a representation of reality, this scholarship is bound to the categories of influence and competition, and concentrates mainly on Hooke's numerous passionate exchanges with Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens. I favourably explore the neo-pragmatist criticism of representation epistemology in the writing of Richard Rorty and Ian Hacking. This criticism exposes the conventional portrayal of Hooke as 'a mechanic of genius, rather than a scientist' (Hall) as a reification of the social hierarchy between Hooke's Royal Society employers and his artisan-experimenters employees. However, Rorty and Hacking's efforts to do away with the image of the human knower as an enclosed realm of 'ideas' have not been completed. Undertaking this unfinished philosophical task, my main strategy is to erase the false gap between knowledge which is clearly produced—practical, technological and experimental, 'know how', and knowledge which we still think of as representation—theoretical 'knowing that'. I present Hooke, Newton and Huygens as craftsmen, who, employing various resources, labor to manufacture material and theoretical artifacts. Eschewing the category of independent facts awaiting discovery, I attempt to compare practices and techniques rather than to adjudicate priority claims, replacing ideas which 'develop', 'inspire', and 'influence', with tools and skills which are borrowed, appropriated and modified for new uses. This approach enables tracing Hooke's creation of his Programme from his microscopy, and reconstructing his use of springs to structure a theory of matter. With his unique combination of technical and speculative talents Hooke comes to personify the relations between the theoretical-linguistic and the experimental-technological in their full complexity.

David Rudge (1996)

• Western Michigan University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• The Role of History and Philosophy of Science for the Teaching and Learning of Science
• Dissertation: A philosophical analysis of the role of selection experiments in evolutionary biology

My dissertation philosophically analyzes experiments in evolutionary biology, an area of science where experimental approaches have tended to supplement, rather than supercede more traditional approaches, such as field observations. I conduct the analysis on the basis of three case studies of famous episodes in the history of selection experiments: H. B. D. Kettlewell's investigations of industrial melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia; two of Th. Dobzhansky's studies of adaptive radiation in the fruit fly, Drosophila pseudoobscura ; and M. Wade's studies of group selection in the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum . The case studies analyze the arguments and evidence these investigators used to identify the respective roles of experiments and other forms of inquiry in their investigations. I discuss three philosophical issues. First, the analysis considers whether these selection experiments fit models of experimentation developed in the context of micro-and high energy physics by Allan Franklin (1986, 1990) and Peter Galison (1987). My analysis documents that the methods used in the case studies can be accommodated on both Franklin and Galison's views. I conclude the case studies do not support claims regarding the relative autonomy of biology. Second, the analysis documents a number of important roles for life history data acquired by strictly observational means in the process of experimentation, from identification of research problems and development of experimental designs to interpretation of results. Divorced from this context experiments in biology make no sense. Thus, in principle, experimental approaches cannot replace more traditional methods. Third, the analysis examines a superficial tension between the use of experiments, which I characterize by the presence of artificial intervention, and the stated goal of most investigations in evolutionary biology, that of understanding how systems behave in the absence of intervention. Experiments involve trade-offs between the control one has over the circumstances of the study and how informative the study is with regard to questions of interest to biologists regarding specific, actual systems in nature. Experimental simulations of natural phenomena in other historical sciences (e.g. meteorology) involve similar trade-offs, but there are reasons for believing this tension is more prominent in biology.

Madeline Muntersbjorn (1996)

• University of Toledo (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• History and Philosophy of Mathematics, Calculus in the Seventeenth Century
• Dissertation: Algebraic Reasoning and Representation in Seventeenth Century Mathematics: Fermat and the Treatise on Quadrature C. 1657

Contemporary philosophers of mathematics commonly assume that mathematical reasoning is representation neutral, or that changes from one notational system to another do not reflect corresponding changes in mathematical reasoning. Historians of mathematics commonly hypothesize that the incorporation of algebraic representations into geometrical pursuits contributed to the problem-solving generality of seventeenth-century mathematical techniques and to the invention of the infinitesimal calculus. In order to critically evaluate the relative merits of these positions, the dissertation analyzes representational techniques employed by Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) in the development of seventeenth-century quadrature methods. The detailed case study of Fermat's Treatise on Quadrature c. 1657 illustrates the manner in which his representational strategy contributes to the generality of his quadrature methods. The dissertation concludes that, although 17th-century mathematicians' use of algebraic representations cannot simpliciter explain the generality of mathematical techniques developed during that time, Fermat's use of a variety of representational means—figures, discursive text, equations, and so on—can explain the generality of his methods. Thus, the dissertation lays the foundation for a larger argument against the common philosophical assumption of representation neutrality and for the thesis that developing a good representational strategy is a philosophically significant feature of mathematical reasoning.

Michel Janssen (1995)

• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, History of Relativity Theory
• Dissertation: A comparison between Lorentz's ether theory and special relativity in the light of the experiments of Trouton and Noble

In Part One of this dissertation, I analyze various accounts of two etherdrift experiments, the Trouton-Noble experiment and an earlier experiment by Trouton. Both aimed at detecting etherdrift with the help of a condenser in a torsion balance. I argue that the difficulties ether-theorists Lorentz and Larmor had in accounting for the negative results of these experiments stem from the fact that they did not (properly) take into account that, if we charge a moving condenser, we not only change its energy, but also its momentum and its mass. I establish two additional results. (1) The Trouton experiment can be seen as a physical realization of a thought experiment used by Einstein to argue for the inertia of energy. (2) Closely following Rohrlich, I develop an alternative to Laue's canonical relativistic account of the Trouton-Noble experiment to show that the turning couple Trouton and Noble were looking for is a purely kinematical effect in special relativity. I call this effect the Laue effect.

The Contributions of Philosophy of Science in Science Education Research: a Literature Review

• Published: 30 November 2023

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• Wencheng Liu 1 , 2 ,
• Xiaofei Li 1 &
• Gaofeng Li   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5827-7112 3  

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The philosophy of science (POS) has gained recognition for its contributions to science education, particularly in integrating the history and philosophy of science (HPS). However, the existing literature lacks a comprehensive review that systematically investigates the implications and limitations of POS in science education research. This study conducted a systematic literature review of 54 studies published in internationally reputed journals between 2000 and 2021. The aim is to understand the implications and limitations of integrating POS into science education. The findings revealed that POS has a significant positive impact on science education, specifically in enhancing conceptual understanding and knowledge of the nature of science (NOS). It went beyond singular epistemological influences and changed teachers’ beliefs about teaching methods. However, implementing POS in science education faced challenges such as unclear teaching objectives, a lack of POS perspective in textbooks, curriculum constraints, and insufficient specialized training for teachers. The study offers a comprehensive review of the contributions of POS to science education, filling a gap in the existing literature. It highlights the positive impacts and critically examines the limitations and challenges, providing a balanced view for future research and practice.

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This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant number GK202303004.

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Liu, W., Li, X. & Li, G. The Contributions of Philosophy of Science in Science Education Research: a Literature Review. Sci & Educ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-023-00485-w

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Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.

1. Life and Career

2. the development of science, 3. the concept of a paradigm, 4.1 methodological incommensurability, 4.2 perception, observational incommensurability, and world-change, 4.3 kuhn’s early semantic incommensurability thesis, 4.4 kuhn’s later semantic incommensurability thesis, 5. history of science, 6.1 scientific change, 6.2 incommensurability, 6.3 kuhn and social science, 6.4 recent developments, 6.5 assessment, other internet resources, related entries.

Thomas Kuhn’s academic life started in physics. He then switched to history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to philosophy of science, although retaining a strong interest in the history of physics. In 1943, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude . Thereafter he spent the remainder of the war years in research related to radar at Harvard and then in Europe. He gained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and his doctorate in 1949, also in physics (concerning an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics). Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, another of whose members was W. V. Quine. At this time, and until 1956, Kuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum, developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. This course was centred around historical case studies, and this was Kuhn’s first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail. His initial bewilderment on reading the scientific work of Aristotle was a formative experience, followed as it was by a more or less sudden ability to understand Aristotle properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science.

This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution .

In 1961 Kuhn became a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, having moved there in 1956 to take up a post in history of science, but in the philosophy department. This enabled him to develop his interest in the philosophy of science. At Berkeley Kuhn’s colleagues included Stanley Cavell, who introduced Kuhn to the works of Wittgenstein, and Paul Feyerabend. With Feyerabend Kuhn discussed a draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which was published in 1962 in the series “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science”, edited by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. The central idea of this extraordinarily influential—and controversial—book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories. Most of Kuhn’s subsequent work in philosophy was spent in articulating and developing the ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , although some of these, such as the thesis of incommensurability, underwent transformation in the process.

According to Kuhn himself (2000, 307), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions first aroused interest among social scientists, although it did in due course create the interest among philosophers that Kuhn had intended (and also before long among a much wider academic and general audience). While acknowledging the importance of Kuhn’s ideas, the philosophical reception was nonetheless hostile. For example, Dudley Shapere’s review (1964) emphasized the relativist implications of Kuhn’s ideas, and this set the context for much subsequent philosophical discussion. Since the following of rules (of logic, of scientific method, etc.) was regarded as the sine qua non of rationality, Kuhn’s claim that scientists do not employ rules in reaching their decisions appeared tantamount to the claim that science is irrational. This was highlighted by his rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification (denying that we can distinguish between the psychological process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth) and his emphasis on incommensurability (the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories are impossible). The negative response among philosophers was exacerbated by an important naturalistic tendency in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that was then unfamiliar. A particularly significant instance of this was Kuhn’s insistence on the importance of the history of science for philosophy of science. The opening sentence of the book reads: “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1962/1970, 1). Also significant and unfamiliar was Kuhn’s appeal to psychological literature and examples (such as linking theory-change with the changing appearance of a Gestalt image).

In 1964 Kuhn left Berkeley to take up the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In the following year an important event took place which helped promote Kuhn’s profile further among philosophers. An International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science was held at Bedford College, London. One of the key events of the Colloquium was intended to be a debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend, with Feyerabend promoting the critical rationalism that he shared with Popper. As it was, Feyerabend was ill and unable to attend, and the papers delivered focussed on Kuhn’s work. John Watkins took Feyerabend’s place in a session chaired by Popper. The ensuing discussion, to which Popper and also Margaret Masterman and Stephen Toulmin contributed, compared and contrasted the viewpoints of Kuhn and Popper and thereby helped illuminate the significance of Kuhn’s approach. Papers from these discussants along with contributions from Feyerabend and Lakatos, were published several years later, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge , edited by Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970) (the fourth volume of proceedings from this Colloquium). In the same year the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, including an important postscript in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm. This was in part in response to Masterman’s (1970) criticism that Kuhn had used ‘paradigm’ in a wide variety of ways; in addition, Kuhn felt that critics had failed to appreciate the emphasis he placed upon the idea of a paradigm as an exemplar or model of puzzle-solving. Kuhn also, for the first time, explicitly gave his work an anti-realist element by denying the coherence of the idea that theories could be regarded as more or less close to the truth.

A collection of Kuhn’s essays in the philosophy and history of science was published in 1977, with the title The Essential Tension taken from one of Kuhn’s earliest essays in which he emphasizes the importance of tradition in science. The following year saw the publication of his second historical monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity , concerning the early history of quantum mechanics. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Kuhn continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s to work on a variety of topics in both history and philosophy of science, including the development of the concept of incommensurability, and at the time of his death in 1996 he was working on a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn paints a picture of the development of science quite unlike any that had gone before. Indeed, before Kuhn, there was little by way of a carefully considered, theoretically explained account of scientific change. Instead, there was a conception of how science ought to develop that was a by-product of the prevailing philosophy of science, as well as a popular, heroic view of scientific progress. According to such opinions, science develops by the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors. Such progress might accelerate in the hands of a particularly great scientist, but progress itself is guaranteed by the scientific method.

In the 1950s, when Kuhn began his historical studies of science, the history of science was a young academic discipline. Even so, it was becoming clear that scientific change was not always as straightforward as the standard, traditional view would have it. Kuhn was the first and most important author to articulate a developed alternative account. Since the standard view dovetailed with the dominant, positivist-influenced philosophy of science, a non-standard view would have important consequences for the philosophy of science. Kuhn had little formal philosophical training but was nonetheless fully conscious of the significance of his innovation for philosophy, and indeed he called his work ‘history for philosophical purposes’ (Kuhn 2000, 276).

According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science. Normal science does resemble the standard cumulative picture of scientific progress, on the surface at least. Kuhn describes normal science as ‘puzzle-solving’ (1962/1970a, 35–42). While this term suggests that normal science is not dramatic, its main purpose is to convey the idea that like someone doing a crossword puzzle or a chess problem or a jigsaw, the puzzle-solver expects to have a reasonable chance of solving the puzzle, that his doing so will depend mainly on his own ability, and that the puzzle itself and its methods of solution will have a high degree of familiarity. A puzzle-solver is not entering completely uncharted territory. Because its puzzles and their solutions are familiar and relatively straightforward, normal science can expect to accumulate a growing stock of puzzle-solutions. Revolutionary science, however, is not cumulative in that, according to Kuhn, scientific revolutions involve a revision to existing scientific belief or practice (1962/1970a, 92). Not all the achievements of the preceding period of normal science are preserved in a revolution, and indeed a later period of science may find itself without an explanation for a phenomenon that in an earlier period was held to be successfully explained. This feature of scientific revolutions has become known as ‘Kuhn-loss’ (1962/1970a, 99–100).

If, as in the standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Revolutions are to be sought on Popper’s view also, but not because they add to positive knowledge of the truth of theories but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories are false. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. This tension between the desire for innovation and the necessary conservativeness of most scientists was the subject of one of Kuhn’s first essays in the theory of science, “The Essential Tension” (1959). The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.

This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed. A widespread failure in such confidence Kuhn calls a ‘crisis’ (1962/1970a, 66–76).

The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles. Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled. For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. Kuhn does briefly mention that extra-scientific factors might help decide the outcome of a scientific revolution—the nationalities and personalities of leading protagonists, for example (1962/1970a, 152–3). This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas.

Kuhn states that science does progress, even through revolutions (1962/1970a, 160ff). The phenomenon of Kuhn-loss does, in Kuhn’s view, rule out the traditional cumulative picture of progress. The revolutionary search for a replacement paradigm is driven by the failure of the existing paradigm to solve certain important anomalies. Any replacement paradigm had better solve the majority of those puzzles, or it will not be worth adopting in place of the existing paradigm. At the same time, even if there is some Kuhn-loss, a worthy replacement must also retain much of the problem-solving power of its predecessor (1962/1970a, 169). (Kuhn does clarify the point by asserting that the newer theory must retain pretty well all its predecessor’s power to solve quantitative problems. It may however lose some qualitative, explanatory power [1970b, 20].) Hence we can say that revolutions do bring with them an overall increase in puzzle-solving power, the number and significance of the puzzles and anomalies solved by the revised paradigm exceeding the number and significance of the puzzles-solutions that are no longer available as a result of Kuhn-loss. Kuhn is quick to deny that there is any inference from such increases to improved nearness to the truth ((1962/1970a, 170–1). Indeed he later denies that any sense can be made of the notion of nearness to the truth (1970a, 206).

Rejecting a teleological view of science progressing towards the truth, Kuhn favours an evolutionary view of scientific progress (1962/1970a, 170–3), discussed in detail by Wray (2011) (see also Bird 2000 and Renzi 2009). The evolutionary development of an organism might be seen as its response to a challenge set by its environment. But that does not imply that there is some ideal form of the organism that it is evolving towards. Analogously, science improves by allowing its theories to evolve in response to puzzles and progress is measured by its success in solving those puzzles; it is not measured by its progress towards to an ideal true theory. While evolution does not lead towards ideal organisms, it does lead to greater diversity of kinds of organism. As Wray explains, this is the basis of a Kuhnian account of specialization in science, an account that Kuhn was developing particularly in the latter part of his career. According to this account, the revolutionary new theory that succeeds in replacing another that is subject to crisis, may fail to satisfy all the needs of those working with the earlier theory. One response to this might be for the field to develop two theories, with domains restricted relative to the original theory (one might be the old theory or a version of it). This formation of new specialties will also bring with it new taxonomic structures and so leads to incommensurability.

A mature science, according to Kuhn, experiences alternating phases of normal science and revolutions. In normal science the key theories, instruments, values and metaphysical assumptions that comprise the disciplinary matrix are kept fixed, permitting the cumulative generation of puzzle-solutions, whereas in a scientific revolution the disciplinary matrix undergoes revision, in order to permit the solution of the more serious anomalous puzzles that disturbed the preceding period of normal science.

A particularly important part of Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions focuses upon one specific component of the disciplinary matrix. This is the consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research. These exemplars of good science are what Kuhn refers to when he uses the term ‘paradigm’ in a narrower sense. He cites Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of plantery positions, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, and Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field as paradigms (1962/1970a, 23). Exemplary instances of science are typically to be found in books and papers, and so Kuhn often also describes great texts as paradigms—Ptolemy’s Almagest , Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie , and Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Opticks (1962/1970a, 12). Such texts contain not only the key theories and laws, but also—and this is what makes them paradigms—the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems, along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques (such as the chemical balance in Traité élémentaire de chimie and the calculus in Principia Mathematica ) employed in those applications.

In the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says of paradigms in this sense that they are “the most novel and least understood aspect of this book” (1962/1970a, 187). The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science. It also explains the birth of a mature science. Kuhn describes an immature science, in what he sometimes calls its ‘pre-paradigm’ period, as lacking consensus. Competing schools of thought possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress. Even localized progress by a particular school is made difficult, since much intellectual energy is put into arguing over the fundamentals with other schools instead of developing a research tradition. However, progress is not impossible, and one school may make a breakthrough whereby the shared problems of the competing schools are solved in a particularly impressive fashion. This success draws away adherents from the other schools, and a widespread consensus is formed around the new puzzle-solutions.

This widespread consensus now permits agreement on fundamentals. For a problem-solution will embody particular theories, procedures and instrumentation, scientific language, metaphysics, and so forth. Consensus on the puzzle-solution will thus bring consensus on these other aspects of a disciplinary matrix also. The successful puzzle-solution, now a paradigm puzzle-solution, will not solve all problems. Indeed, it will probably raise new puzzles. For example, the theories it employs may involve a constant whose value is not known with precision; the paradigm puzzle-solution may employ approximations that could be improved; it may suggest other puzzles of the same kind; it may suggest new areas for investigation. Generating new puzzles is one thing that the paradigm puzzle-solution does; helping solve them is another. In the most favourable scenario, the new puzzles raised by the paradigm puzzle-solution can be addressed and answered using precisely the techniques that the paradigm puzzle-solution employs. And since the paradigm puzzle-solution is accepted as a great achievement, these very similar puzzle-solutions will be accepted as successful solutions also. This is why Kuhn uses the terms ‘exemplar’ and ‘paradigm’. For the novel puzzle-solution which crystallizes consensus is regarded and used as a model of exemplary science. In the research tradition it inaugurates, a paradigm-as-exemplar fulfils three functions: (i) it suggests new puzzles; (ii) it suggests approaches to solving those puzzles; (iii) it is the standard by which the quality of a proposed puzzle-solution can be measured (1962/1970a, 38–9). In each case it is similarity to the exemplar that is the scientists’ guide.

That normal science proceeds on the basis of perceived similarity to exemplars is an important and distinctive feature of Kuhn’s new picture of scientific development. The standard view explained the cumulative addition of new knowledge in terms of the application of the scientific method. Allegedly, the scientific method encapsulates the rules of scientific rationality. It may be that those rules could not account for the creative side of science—the generation of new hypotheses. The latter was thus designated ‘the context of discovery’, leaving the rules of rationality to decide in the ‘context of justification’ whether a new hypothesis should, in the light of the evidence, be added to the stock of accepted theories.

Kuhn rejected the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification (1962/1970a, 8), and correspondingly rejected the standard account of each. As regards the context of discovery, the standard view held that the philosophy of science had nothing to say on the issue of the functioning of the creative imagination. But Kuhn’s paradigms do provide a partial explanation, since training with exemplars enables scientists to see new puzzle-situations in terms of familiar puzzles and hence enables them to see potential solutions to their new puzzles.

More important for Kuhn was the way his account of the context of justification diverged from the standard picture. The functioning of exemplars is intended explicitly to contrast with the operation of rules. The key determinant in the acceptability of a proposed puzzle-solution is its similarity to the paradigmatic puzzle-solutions. Perception of similarity cannot be reduced to rules, and a fortiori cannot be reduced to rules of rationality. This rejection of rules of rationality was one of the factors that led Kuhn’s critics to accuse him of irrationalism—regarding science as irrational. In this respect at least the accusation is wide of the mark. For to deny that some cognitive process is the outcome of applying rules of rationality is not to imply that it is an irrational process: the perception of similarity in appearance between two members of the same family also cannot be reduced to the application of rules of rationality. Kuhn’s innovation in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was to suggest that a key element in cognition in science operates in the same fashion.

4. Incommensurability and World-Change

The standard empiricist conception of theory evaluation regards our judgment of the epistemic quality of a theory to be a matter of applying rules of method to the theory and the evidence. Kuhn’s contrasting view is that we judge the quality of a theory (and its treatment of the evidence) by comparing it to a paradigmatic theory. The standards of assessment therefore are not permanent, theory-independent rules. They are not rules, because they involve perceived relations of similarity (of puzzle-solution to a paradigm). They are not theory-independent, since they involve comparison to a (paradigm) theory. They are not permanent, since the paradigm may change in a scientific revolution. For example, to many in the seventeenth century, Newton’s account of gravitation, involving action at a distance with no underlying explanation, seemed a poor account, in that respect at least, when compared, for example, to Ptolemy’s explanation of the motion of the planets in terms of contiguous crystalline spheres or to Descartes’ explanation in terms of vortices. However, later, once Newton’s theory had become accepted and the paradigm by which later theories were judged, the lack of an underlying mechanism for a fundamental force was regarded as no objection, as, for example, in the case of Coulomb’s law of electrostatic attraction. Indeed, in the latter case the very similarity of Coulomb’s equation to Newton’s was taken to be in its favour.

Consequently, comparison between theories will not be as straightforward as the standard empiricist picture would have it, since the standards of evaluation are themselves subject to change. This sort of difficulty in theory comparison is an instance of what Kuhn and Feyerabend called ‘incommensurability’. Theories are incommensurable when they share no common measure. Thus, if paradigms are the measures of attempted puzzle-solutions, then puzzle-solutions developed in different eras of normal science will be judged by comparison to differing paradigms and so lack a common measure. The term ‘incommensurable’ derives from a mathematical use, according to which the side and diagonal of a square are incommensurable in virtue of there being no unit that can be used to measure both exactly. Kuhn stressed that incommensurability did not mean non-comparability (just as the side and diagonal of a square are comparable in many respects). Even so, it is clear that at the very least Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis would make theory comparison rather more difficult than had commonly been supposed, and in some cases impossible.

We can distinguish three types of incommensurability in Kuhn’s remarks: (1) methodological—there is no common measure because the methods of comparison and evaluation change; (2) perceptual/observational—observational evidence cannot provide a common basis for theory comparison, since perceptual experience is theory-dependent; (3) semantic—the fact that the languages of theories from different periods of normal science may not be inter-translatable presents an obstacle to the comparison of those theories. (See Sankey 1993 for a useful discussion of Kuhn’s changing accounts of incommensurability.)

The incommensurability illustrated above whereby puzzle-solutions from different eras of normal science are evaluated by reference to different paradigms, is methodological incommensurability. Another source of methodological incommensurability is the fact that proponents of competing paradigms may not agree on which problems a candidate paradigm should solve (1962/1970a, 148). In general the factors that determine our choices of theory (whether puzzle-solutions or potential paradigm theories) are not fixed and neutral but vary and are dependent in particular on the disciplinary matrix within which the scientist is working. Indeed, since decision making is not rule-governed or algorithmic, there is no guarantee that those working within the same disciplinary matrix must agree on their evaluation of theory (1962/1970a, 200), although in such cases the room for divergence will be less than when the disputants operate within different disciplinary matrices. Despite the possibility of divergence, there is nonetheless widespread agreement on the desirable features of a new puzzle-solution or theory. Kuhn (1977, 321–2) identifies five characteristics that provide the shared basis for a choice of theory: 1. accuracy; 2. consistency (both internal and with other relevant currently accepted theories); 3. scope (its consequences should extend beyond the data it is required to explain); 4. simplicity (organizing otherwise confused and isolated phenomena); 5. fruitfulness (for further research). Even though these are, for Kuhn, constitutive of science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338) they cannot determine scientific choice. First, which features of a theory satisfy these criteria may be disputable (e.g. does simplicity concern the ontological commitments of a theory or its mathematical form?). Secondly, these criteria are imprecise, and so there is room for disagreement about the degree to which they hold. Thirdly, there can be disagreement about how they are to be weighted relative to one another, especially when they conflict.

An important focus of Kuhn’s interest in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was on the nature of perception and how it may be that what a scientist observes can change as a result of scientific revolution. He developed what has become known as the thesis of the theory-dependence of observation, building on the work of N. R. Hanson (1958) while also referring to psychological studies carried out by his Harvard colleagues, Leo Postman and Jerome Bruner (Bruner and Postman 1949). The standard positivist view was that observation provides the neutral arbiter between competing theories. The thesis that Kuhn and Hanson promoted denied this, holding that the nature of observation may be influenced by prior beliefs and experiences. Consequently it cannot be expected that two scientists when observing the same scene will make the same theory-neutral observations. Kuhn asserts that Galileo and an Aristotelian when both looking at a pendulum will see different things (see quoted passage below).

The theory-dependence of observation, by rejecting the role of observation as a theory-neutral arbiter among theories, provides another source of incommensurability. Methodological incommensurability (§4.1 above) denies that there are universal methods for making inferences from the data. The theory-dependence of observation means that even if there were agreed methods of inference and interpretation, incommensurability could still arise since scientists might disagree on the nature of the observational data themselves.

Kuhn expresses or builds on the idea that participants in different disciplinary matrices will see the world differently by claiming that their worlds are different:

In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).

Remarks such as these gave some commentators the impression that Kuhn was a strong kind of constructivist, holding that the way the world literally is depends on which scientific theory is currently accepted. Kuhn, however, denied any constructivist import to his remarks on world-change. (The closest Kuhn came to constructivism was to acknowledge a parallel with Kantian idealism, which is discussed below in Section 6.4.)

Kuhn likened the change in the phenomenal world to the Gestalt-switch that occurs when one sees the duck-rabbit diagram first as (representing) a duck then as (representing) a rabbit, although he himself acknowledged that he was not sure whether the Gestalt case was just an analogy or whether it illustrated some more general truth about the way the mind works that encompasses the scientific case too.

Although the theory-dependence of observation plays a significant role in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , neither it nor methodological incommensurability could account for all the phenomena that Kuhn wanted to capture with the notion of incommensurability. Some of his own examples are rather stretched—for instance he says Lavoisier saw oxygen where Priestley saw dephlogisticated air, describing this as a ‘transformation of vision’ (1962/1970a, 118). Moreover observation—if conceived of as a form of perception—does not play a significant part in every science. Kuhn wanted to explain his own experience of reading Aristotle, which first left him with the impression that Aristotle was an inexplicably poor scientist (Kuhn 1987). But careful study led to a change in his understanding that allowed him to see that Aristotle was indeed an excellent scientist. This could not simply be a matter of literally perceiving things differently. Kuhn took the incommensurability that prevented him from properly understanding Aristotle to be at least partly a linguistic, semantic matter. Indeed, Kuhn spent much of his career after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions attempting to articulate a semantic conception of incommensurability.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn asserts that there are important shifts in the meanings of key terms as a consequence of a scientific revolution. For example, Kuhn says:

… the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same.) (1962/1970a, 102)

This is important, because a standard conception of the transition from classical to relativistic physics is that although Einstein’s theory of relativity supersedes Newton’s theory, what we have is an improvement or generalization whereby Newton’s theory is a special case of Einstein’s (to a close approximation). We can therefore say that the later theory is closer to the truth than the older theory. Kuhn’s view that ‘mass’ as used by Newton cannot be translated by ‘mass’ as used by Einstein allegedly renders this kind of comparison impossible. Hence incommensurability is supposed to rule out convergent realism, the view that science shows ever improving approximation to the truth. (Kuhn also thinks, for independent reasons, that the very ideas of matching the truth and similarity to the truth are incoherent (1970a, 206).)

Kuhn’s view as expressed in the passage quoted above depends upon meaning holism—the claim that the meanings of terms are interrelated in such a way that changing the meaning of one term results in changes in the meanings of related terms: “To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole.” (1962/1970a, 149). The assumption of meaning holism is a long standing one in Kuhn’s work. One source for this is the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Another not unrelated source is the assumption of holism in the philosophy of science that is consequent upon the positivist conception of theoretical meaning. According to the latter, it is not the function of the theoretical part of scientific language to refer to and describe unobserved entities. Only observational sentences directly describe the world, and this accounts for them having the meaning that they do. Theories permit the deduction of observational sentences. This is what gives theoretical expressions their meaning. Theoretical statements cannot, however, be reduced to observational ones. This is because, first, theoretical propositions are collectively involved in the deduction of observational statements, rather than singly. Secondly, theories generate dispositional statements (e.g. about the solubility of a substance, about how they would appear if observed under certain circumstances, etc.), and dispositional statements, being modal, are not equivalent to any truth-function of (non-modal) observation statements. Consequently, the meaning of a theoretical sentence is not equivalent to the meaning of any observational sentence or combination of observational sentences. The meaning of a theoretical term is a product of two factors: the relationship of the theory or theories of which it is a part to its observational consequences and the role that particular term plays within those theories. This is the double-language model of the language of science and was the standard picture of the relationship of a scientific theory to the world when Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Kuhn’s challenge to it lay not in rejecting the anti-realism implicit in the view that theories do not refer to the world but rather in undermining the assumption that the relationship of observation sentence to the world is unproblematic. By insisting on the theory-dependence of observation, Kuhn in effect argued that the holism of theoretical meaning is shared by apparently observational terms also, and for this reason the problem of incommensurability cannot be solved by recourse to theory-neutral observation sentences.

(Although it is true that Kuhn uses the expression ‘physical referent’ in the passage quoted above, this should not be taken to mean an independently existing worldly entity. If that were the case, Kuhn would be committed to the worldly existence of both Newtonian mass and Einsteinian mass (which are nonetheless not the same). It is implausible that Kuhn intended to endorse such a view. A better interpretation is to understand Kuhn as taking reference, in this context, to be a relation between a term and a hypothetical rather than worldly entity. Reference of anything like the Fregean, worldly kind plays no part in Kuhn’s thinking. Again this may be seen as a reflection of the influence of one or other or both of the (later) Wittgensteinian downplaying of reference and of the positivist view that theories are not descriptions of the world but are in one way or another tools for the organization or prediction of observations.)

Although Kuhn asserted a semantic incommensurability thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he did not there articulate or argue for the thesis in detail. This he attempted in subsequent work, with the result that the nature of the thesis changed over time. The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible. Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are translating one language into another, there are inevitably a multitude of ways of providing a translation that is adequate to the behaviour of the speakers. None of the translations is the uniquely correct one, and in Quine’s view there is no such thing as the meaning of the words to be translated. It was nonetheless clear that Quine’s thesis was rather far from Kuhn’s thesis, indeed that they are incompatible. First, Kuhn thought that incommensurability was a matter of there being no fully adequate translation whereas Quine’s thesis involved the availability of multiple translations. Secondly, Kuhn does believe that the translated expressions do have a meaning, whereas Quine denies this. Thirdly, Kuhn later went on to say that unlike Quine he does not think that reference is inscrutable—it is just very difficult to recover (1976, 191).

Subsequently, Kuhn developed the view that incommensurability arises from differences in classificatory schemes. This is taxonomic incommensurability. A field of science is governed by a taxonomy, which divides its subject matter into kinds. Associated with a taxonomy is a lexical network—a network of related terms. A significant scientific change will bring with it an alteration in the lexical network which in turn will lead to a re-alignment of the taxonomy of the field. The terms of the new and old taxonomies will not be inter-translatable.

The problematic nature of translation arises from two assumptions. First, as we have seen, Kuhn assumes that meaning is (locally) holistic. A change in the meaning of one part of the lexical structure will result in a change to all its parts. This would rule out preservation of the translatability of taxonomies by redefining the changed part in terms of the unchanged part. Secondly, Kuhn adopts the ‘no-overlap’ principle which states that categories in a taxonomy must be hierarchically organised: if two categories have members in common then one must be fully included within the other; otherwise they are disjoint—they cannot simply overlap. This rules out the possibility of an all-encompassing taxonomy that incorporates both the original and the changed taxonomies. (Ian Hacking (1993) relates this to the world-change thesis: after a revolution the world of individuals remains as it was, but scientists now work in a world of new kinds .)

Kuhn continued to develop his conceptual approach to incommensurability. At the time of his death he had made considerable progress on a book in which he related incommensurability to issues in developmental psychology and concept acquisition.

Kuhn’s historical work covered several topics in the history of physics and astronomy. During the 1950s his focus was primarily on the early theory of heat and the work of Sadi Carnot. However, his first book concerned the Copernican revolution in planetary astronomy (1957). This book grew out of the teaching he had done on James Conant’s General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard but also presaged some of the ideas of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . In detailing the problems with the Ptolemaic system and Copernicus’ solution to them, Kuhn showed two things. First, he demonstrated that Aristotelian science was genuine science and that those working within that tradition, in particular those working on Ptolemaic astronomy, were engaged in an entirely reasonable and recognizably scientific project. Secondly, Kuhn showed that Copernicus was himself far more indebted to that tradition than had typically been recognized. Thus the popular view that Copernicus was a modern scientist who overthrew an unscientific and long-outmoded viewpoint is mistaken both by exaggerating the difference between Copernicus and the Ptolemaic astronomers and in underestimating the scientific credentials of work carried out before Copernicus. This mistaken view—a product of the distortion caused by our current state of knowledge—can be rectified only by seeing the activities of Copernicus and his predecessors in the light of the puzzles presented to them by tradition that they inevitably had to work with. While Kuhn does acknowledge the influence of causes outside science (such as a resurgence in Sun worship (1962/70a, 152–3)), he nonetheless emphasizes the fact that astronomers were responding primarily to problems raised within science. What appealed to them in Copernicus’ model was its ability to do away with ad hoc devices in Ptolemy’s system (such as the equant), to explain key phenomena in a pleasing fashion (the observed retrograde motion of the planets), and to explain away otherwise inexplicable coincidences in Ptolemy’s system (such as the alignment of the Sun and the centres of the epicycles of the inferior planets).

In the 1960s Kuhn’s historical work turned toward the early history of quantum theory, culminating in his book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity . According to classical physics a particle could possess any energy in a continuous range and if it changes energy it does so in a continuous fashion, possessing at some point in time every energy between the initial and final energy states. Modern quantum theory denies both these classical principles. Energy is quantised—a particle may possess only one of a set of discrete energies. Consequently if it changes in energy from one value to the next permitted value it does so discontinuously, jumping straight from one energy to the other without taking any of the intermediate (‘forbidden’) values. In order to explain the distribution of energy within a cavity (black-body radiation), Planck used the device of dividing up the energy states into multiples of the unit or ‘quantum’ h ν (where ν is the frequency of radiation and h is what subsequently became known as Planck’s constant). Planck did this in order to employ a statistical technique of Boltzmann’s whereby the range of possible continuous energies is divided into ‘cells’ of similar energies that could be treated together for mathematical purposes. Kuhn notes that Planck was puzzled that in carrying out his derivation, only by fixing the cell size at h ν could he get the result he wanted—the technique should have worked for any way of dividing the cells, so long as they were small enough but not too small. This work of Planck’s was carried out in the period 1900–1, which is the date tradition has accorded to the invention of the quantum concept. However, argued Kuhn, Planck did not have in mind a genuine physical discontinuity of energies until 1908, which is after Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest had themselves emphasized it in 1905–6.

Many readers were surprised not to find mention of paradigms or incommensurability. Kuhn later added an Afterword, “Revisiting Planck”, explaining that he had not repudiated or ignored those ideas but that they were implicit in the argument he gave. Indeed the whole essay may be seen as a demonstration of an incommensurability between the mature quantum theory and the early quantum theory of Planck which was still rooted in classical statistical physics. In particular the very term ‘quantum’ changed its meaning between its introduction by Planck and its later use. Kuhn argues that the modern quantum concept was introduced first not by Planck but by Einstein. Furthermore, this fact is hidden both by the continued use of the same term and by the same distortion of history that has affected our conception of Ptolemy and Copernicus. As in Copernicus’ case, Planck has been seen as more revolutionary than in fact he was. In Planck’s case, however, this misconception was also shared by Planck himself later in life.

6. Criticism and Influence

Kuhn’s work met with a largely critical reception among philosophers. Some of this criticism became muted as Kuhn’s work became better understood and as his own thinking underwent transformation. At the same time other developments in philosophy opened up new avenues for criticism. That criticism has largely focussed on two areas. First, it has been argued that Kuhn’s account of the development of science is not entirely accurate. Secondly, critics have attacked Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability, arguing that either it does not exist or, if it does exist, it is not a significant problem. Despite this criticism, Kuhn’s work has been hugely influential, both within philosophy and outside it. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an important stimulus to what has since become known as ‘Science Studies’, in particular the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK).

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions periods of normal science and revolutionary science are clearly distinguished. In particular paradigms and their theories are not questioned and not changed in normal science whereas they are questioned and are changed in revolutionary science. Thus a revolution is, by definition revisionary, and normal science is not (as regards paradigms). Furthermore, normal science does not suffer from the conceptual discontinuities that lead to incommensurability whereas revolutions do. This gives the impression, confirmed by Kuhn’s examples, that revolutions are particularly significant and reasonably rare episodes in the history of science.

This picture has been questioned for its accuracy. Stephen Toulmin (1970) argues that a more realistic picture shows that revisionary changes in science are far more common and correspondingly less dramatic than Kuhn supposes, and that perfectly ‘normal’ science experiences these changes also. Kuhn could reply that such revisions are not revisions to the paradigm but to the non-paradigm puzzle-solutions provided by normal science. But that in turn requires a clear distinction between paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic components of science, a distinction that, arguably, Kuhn has not supplied in any detail.

At the same time, by making revisionary change a necessary condition of revolutionary science, Kuhn ignores important discoveries and developments that are widely regarded as revolutionary, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA and the revolution in molecular biology. Kuhn’s view is that discoveries and revolutions come about only as a consequence of the appearance of anomalies. Yet it is also clear that a discovery might come about in the course of normal science and initiate a ‘revolution’ (in a non-Kuhnian sense) in a field because of the unexpected insight it provides and the way it opens up opportunities for new avenues of research. The double-helical structure of DNA was not expected but immediately suggested a mechanism for the duplication of genetic information (e.g. in mitosis), which had enormous consequences for subsequent biological research.

Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis presented a challenge not only to positivist conceptions of scientific change but also to realist ones. For a realist conception of scientific progress also wishes to assert that, by and large, later science improves on earlier science, in particular by approaching closer to the truth. A standard realist response from the late 1960s was to reject the anti-realism and anti-referentialism shared by both Kuhn’s picture and the preceding double-language model. If we do take theories to be potential descriptions of the world, involving reference to worldly entities, kind, and properties, then the problems raised by incommensurability largely evaporate. As we have seen, Kuhn thinks that we cannot properly say that Einstein’s theory is an improvement on Newton’s in the sense that the latter as deals reasonably accurately (only) with a special case of the former. Whether or not the key terms (such as ‘mass’) in the two theories differ in meaning, a realist and referentialist approach to theories permits one to say that Einstein’s theory is closer to the truth than Newton’s. For truth and nearness to the truth depend only on reference and not on sense. Two terms can differ in sense yet share the same reference, and correspondingly two sentences may relate to one another as regards truth without their sharing terms with the same sense. And so even if we retain a holism about the sense of theoretical terms and allow that revolutions lead to shifts in sense, there is no direct inference from this to a shift in reference. Consequently, there is no inference to the inadmissibility of the comparison of theories with respect to their truth-nearness.

While this referentialist response to the incommensurability thesis was initially framed in Fregean terms (Scheffler 1967), it received further impetus from the work of Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975b), which argued that reference could be achieved without anything akin to Fregean sense and that the natural kind terms of science exemplified this sense-free reference. In particular, causal theories of reference permit continuity of reference even through fairly radical theoretical change. (They do not guarantee continuity in reference, and changes in reference can occur on some causal theories, e.g. Gareth Evans’s (1973). Arguing that they do occur would require more, however, than merely pointing to a change in theory. Rather, it seems, cases of reference change must be identified and argued for on a case by case basis.) Therefore, if taken to encompass terms for quantities and properties (such as ‘mass’), the changes that Kuhn identified as changes in meaning (e.g. those involved in the shift from Newtonian to relativistic physics) would not necessarily be changes that bear on reference, nor, consequently, on comparison for nearness to the truth. The simple causal theory of reference does have its problems, such as explaining the referential mechanism of empty theoretical terms (e.g.caloric and phlogiston) (c.f. Enç 1976, Nola 1980). Causal-descriptive theories (which allow for a descriptive component) tackle such problems while retaining the key idea that referential continuity is possible despite radical theory change (Kroon 1985, Sankey 1994).

Of course, the referentialist response shows only that reference can be retained, not that it must be. Consequently it is only a partial defence of realism against semantic incommensurability. A further component of the defence of realism against incommensurability must be an epistemic one. For referentialism shows that a term can retain reference and hence that the relevant theories may be such that the later constitutes a better approximation to the truth than the earlier. Nonetheless it may not be possible for philosophers or others to know that there has been such progress. Methodological incommensurability in particular seems to threaten the possibility of this knowledge. Kuhn thinks that in order to be in a position to compare theories from older and more recent periods of normal science one needs a perspective external to each and indeed any era of science–what he calls an ‘Archimedean platform’ (1992, 14). However, we never are able to escape from our current perspective. A realist response to this kind of incommensurability may appeal to externalist or naturalized epistemology. These (related) approaches reject the idea that for a method to yield knowledge it must be independent of any particular theory, perspective, or historical/cognitive circumstance. So long as the method has an appropriate kind of reliability it can generate knowledge. Contrary to the internalist view characteristic of the positivists (and, it appears, shared by Kuhn) the reliability of a method does not need to be one that must be evaluable independently of any particular scientific perspective. It is not the case, for example, that the reliability of a method used in science must be justifiable by a priori means. Thus the methods developed in one era may indeed generate knowledge, including knowledge that some previous era got certain matters wrong, or right but only to a certain degree. A naturalized epistemology may add that science itself is in the business of investigating and developing methods. As science develops we would expect its methods to change and develop also.

Kuhn’s influence outside of professional philosophy of science may have been even greater than it was within it. The social sciences in particular took up Kuhn with enthusiasm. There are primarily two reasons for this. First, Kuhn’s picture of science appeared to permit a more liberal conception of what science is than hitherto, one that could be taken to include disciplines such as sociology and psychoanalysis. Secondly, Kuhn’s rejection of rules as determining scientific outcomes appeared to permit appeal to other factors, external to science, in explaining why a scientific revolution took the course that it did.

The status as genuine sciences of what we now call the social and human sciences has widely been held in doubt. Such disciplines lack the remarkable track record of established natural sciences and seem to differ also in the methods they employ. More specifically they fail by pre-Kuhnian philosophical criteria of sciencehood. On the one hand, positivists required of a science that it should be verifiable by reference to its predictive successes. On the other, Popper’s criterion was that a science should be potentially falsifiable by a prediction of the theory. Yet psychoanalysis, sociology and even economics have difficulty in making precise predictions at all, let alone ones that provide for clear confirmation or unambiguous refutation. Kuhn’s picture of a mature science as being dominated by a paradigm that generated sui generis puzzles and criteria for assessing solutions to them could much more easily accommodate these disciplines. For example, Popper famously complained that psychoanalysis could not be scientific because it resists falsification. Kuhn’s account argues that resisting falsification is precisely what every disciplinary matrix in science does. Even disciplines that could not claim to be dominated by a settled paradigm but were beset by competing schools with different fundamental ideas could appeal to Kuhn’s description of the pre-paradigm state of a science in its infancy. Consequently Kuhn’s analysis was popular among those seeking legitimacy as science (and consequently kudos and funding) for their new disciplines. Kuhn himself did not especially promote such extensions of his views, and indeed cast doubt upon them. He denied that psychoanalysis is a science and argued that there are reasons why some fields within the social sciences could not sustain extended periods of puzzle-solving normal science (1991b). Although, he says, the natural sciences involve interpretation just as human and social sciences do, one difference is that hermeneutic re-interpretation, the search for new and deeper intepretations, is the essence of many social scientific enterprises. This contrasts with the natural sciences where an established and unchanging interpretation (e.g. of the heavens) is a pre-condition of normal science. Re-intepretation is the result of a scientific revolution and is typically resisted rather than actively sought. Another reason why regular reinterpretation is part of the human sciences and not the natural sciences is that social and political systems are themselves changing in ways that call for new interpretations, whereas the subject matter of the natural sciences is constant in the relevant respects, permitting a puzzle-solving tradition as well as a standing source of revolution-generating anomalies.

A rather different influence on social science was Kuhn’s influence on the development of social studies of science itself, in particular the ‘Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’. A central claim of Kuhn’s work is that scientists do not make their judgments as the result of consciously or unconsciously following rules. Their judgments are nonetheless tightly constrained during normal science by the example of the guiding paradigm. During a revolution they are released from these constraints (though not completely). Consequently there is a gap left for other factors to explain scientific judgments. Kuhn himself suggests in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that Sun worship may have made Kepler a Copernican and that in other cases, facts about an individual’s life history, personality or even nationality and reputation may play a role (1962/70a, 152–3). Later Kuhn repeated the point, with the additional examples of German Romanticism, which disposed certain scientists to recognize and accept energy conservation, and British social thought which enabled acceptance of Darwinism (1977c, 325). Such suggestions were taken up as providing an opportunity for a new kind of study of science, showing how social and political factors external to science influence the outcome of scientific debates. In what has become known as social constructivism/constructionism (e.g. Pickering 1984) this influence is taken to be central, not marginal, and to extend to the very content of accepted theories. Kuhn’s claim and its exploitation can be seen as analogous to or even an instance of the exploitation of the (alleged) underdetermination of theory by evidence (c.f. Kuhn 1992, 7). Feminists and social theorists (e.g. Nelson 1993) have argued that the fact that the evidence, or, in Kuhn’s case, the shared values of science, do not fix a single choice of theory, allows external factors to determine the final outcome (see Martin 1991 and Schiebinger 1999 for feminist social constructivism). Furthermore, the fact that Kuhn identified values as what guide judgment opens up the possibility that scientists ought to employ different values, as has been argued by feminist and post-colonial writers (e.g. Longino 1994).

Kuhn himself, however, showed only limited sympathy for such developments. In his “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science” (1992) Kuhn derides those who take the view that in the ‘negotiations’ that determine the accepted outcome of an experiment or its theoretical significance, all that counts are the interests and power relations among the participants. Kuhn targeted the proponents of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge with such comments; and even if this is not entirely fair to the Strong Programme, it reflects Kuhn’s own view that the primary determinants of the outcome of a scientific episode are to be found within science. External history of science seeks causes of scientific change in social, political, religious and other developments of science. Kuhn sees his work as “pretty straight internalist” (2000: 287). First, the five values Kuhn ascribes to all science are in his view constitutive of science. An enterprise could have different values but it would not be science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338). Secondly, when a scientist is influenced by individual or other factors in applying these values or in coming to a judgment when these values are not decisive, those influencing factors will typically themselves come from within science (especially in modern, professionalized science). Personality may play a role in the acceptance of a theory, because, for example, one scientist is more risk-averse than another (1977c, 325)—but that is still a relationship to the scientific evidence. Even when reputation plays a part, it is typically scientific reputation that encourages the community to back the opinion of an eminent scientist. Thirdly, in a large community such variable factors will tend to cancel out. Kuhn supposes that individual differences are normally distributed and that a judgment corresponding to the mean of the distribution will also correspond to the judgment that would, hypothetically, be demanded by the rules of scientific method, as traditionally conceived (1977c, 333). Moreover, the existence of differences of response within the leeway provided by shared values is crucial to science, since it permits “rational men to disagree” (1977c, 332) and thus to commit themselves to rival theories. Thus the looseness of values and the differences they permit “may . . . appear an indispensable means of spreading the risk which the introduction or support of novelty always entails” (Ibid.).

Even if Kuhn’s work has not remained at the centre of the philosophy of science, a number of philosophers have continued to find it fruitful and have sought to develop it in a number of directions. Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1989/1993), as a result of working with Kuhn, developed an important neo-Kantian interpretation of his discussion of perception and world-change. We may distinguish between the world-in-itself and the ‘world’ of our perceptual and related experiences (the phenomenal world). This corresponds to the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena. The important difference between Kant and Kuhn is that Kuhn takes the general form of phenomena not to be fixed but changeable. A shift in paradigm can lead, via the theory-dependence of observation, to a difference in one’s experiences of things and thus to a change in one’s phenomenal world. This change in phenomenal world articulates the sense in which the world changes as a result of a scientific revolution while also capturing Kuhn’s claims about the theory-dependence of observation and consequent incommensurability (Hoyningen-Huene 1990).

A rather different direction in which Kuhn’s thought has been developed proposes that his ideas might be illuminated by advances in cognitive psychology. One the one hand work on conceptual structures can help understand what might be correct in the incommensurability thesis (Nersessian 1987, 2003). Several authors have sought in different ways to emphasize what they take to be the Wittgensteinian element in Kuhn’s thought (for example Kindi 1995, Sharrock and Read 2002). Andersen, Barker, and Chen (1996, 1998, 2006) draw in particular on Kuhn’s version of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance. Kuhn articulates a view according to which the extension of a concept is determined by similarity to a set of exemplary cases rather than by an intension. Andersen, Barker, and Chen argue that Kuhn’s view is supported by the work of Rosch (1972; Rosch and Mervis 1975) on prototypes; furthermore, this approach can be developed in the context of dynamic frames (Barsalou 1992), which can then explain the phenomenon of (semantic) incommensurability.

On the other hand, the psychology of analogical thinking and cognitive habits may also inform our understanding of the concept of a paradigm. Kuhn himself tells us that “The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of [ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ]” (1970a, 187). Kuhn, however, failed to develop the paradigm concept in his later work beyond an early application of its semantic aspects to the explanation of incommensurability. Nonetheless, other philosophers, principally Howard Margolis (1987, 1993) have developed the idea that habits of mind formed by training with paradigms-as-exemplars are an important component in understanding the nature of scientific development. As explained by Nickles (2003b) and Bird (2005), this is borne out by recent work by psychologists on model-based and analogical thinking.

Assessing Kuhn’s significance presents a conundrum. Unquestionably he was one of the most influential philosophers and historians of science of the twentieth century. His most obvious achievement was to have been a major force in bringing about the final demise of logical positivism. Nonetheless, there is no characteristically Kuhnian school that carries on his positive work. It is as if he himself brought about a revolution but did not supply the replacement paradigm. For a period in the 1960s and 1970s it looked as if there was a Kuhnian paradigm ‘historical philosophy of science’, flourishing especially in newly formed departments of history and philosophy of science. But as far as the history of science and science studies more generally are concerned, Kuhn repudiated at least the more radical developments made in his name. Indeed part of Kuhn’s fame must be due to the fact that both his supporters and his detractors took his work to be more revolutionary (anti-rationalist, relativist) than it really was.

Turning to the philosophy of science, it was clear by the end of the 1980s that the centreground was now occupied by a new realism, one that took on board lessons from general philosophy of language and epistemology, in particular referentialist semantics and a belief in the possibility of objective knowledge and justification. There is some irony therefore in the fact that it was the demise of logical positivism/empiricism that led to the rebirth of scientific realism along with causal and externalist semantics and epistemology, positions that Kuhn rejected.

One way of understanding this outcome is to see that Kuhn’s relationship on the one hand to positivism and on the other hand to realism places him in an interesting position. Kuhn’s thesis of the theory-dependence of observation parallels related claims by realists. In the hands of realists the thesis is taken to undermine the theory-observation dichotomy that permitted positivists to take an anti-realist attitude to theories. In the hands of Kuhn however, the thesis is taken, in effect, to extend anti-realism from theories to observation also. This in turn fuels the thesis of incommensurability. The fact that incommensurability is founded upon a response to positivism diametrically opposed to the realist response explains why much of Kuhn’s later philosophical work, which developed the incommensurability thesis, has had little impact on the majority of philosophers of science.

The explanation of scientific development in terms of paradigms was not only novel but radical too, insofar as it gives a naturalistic explanation of belief-change. Naturalism was not in the early 1960s the familiar part of philosophical landscape that it has subsequently become. Kuhn’s explanation contrasted with explanations in terms of rules of method (or confirmation, falsification etc.) that most philosophers of science took to be constitutive of rationality. Furthermore, the relevant disciplines (psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) were not then advanced enough to to support Kuhn’s contentions concerning paradigms, or those disciplines were antithetical to Kuhn’s views (in the case of classical AI). Now that naturalism has become an accepted component of philosophy, there has recently been interest in reassessing Kuhn’s work in the light of developments in the relevant sciences, many of which provide corroboration for Kuhn’s claim that science is driven by relations of perceived similarity and analogy. It may yet be that a characteristically Kuhnian thesis will play a prominent part in our understanding of science.

Books by Thomas Kuhn

• 1957, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought , Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
• 1962/1970a, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1970, 2nd edition, with postscript).
• 1977a, The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 1978, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity , Oxford: Clarendon Press (2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
• 2000, The Road Since Structure , edited by James Conant and John Haugeland, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Selected papers of Thomas Kuhn

• 1959, “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research”, in The Third (1959) University of Utah Research Conference on the Identification of Scientific Talent C. Taylor, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press: 162–74.
• 1963, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research”, in Scientific Change , A. Crombie (ed.), London: Heinemann: 347–69.
• 1970b, “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?”, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge , edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, London: Cambridge University Press: 1–23.
• 1970c, “Reflections on my Critics”, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge , I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), London: Cambridge University Press: 231–78.
• 1974, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms”, in The Structure of Scientific Theories F. Suppe (ed.), Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press: 459–82.
• 1976, “Theory-Change as Structure-Change: Comments on the Sneed Formalism” Erkenntnis 10: 179–99.
• 1977b, “The Relations between the History and the Philosophy of Science”, in his The Essential Tension , Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 3–20.
• 1977c, “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice”, in his The Essential Tension , Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 320–39.
• 1979, “Metaphor in Science”, in Metaphor and Thought , edited by A. Ortony Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 409–19.
• 1980, “The Halt and the Blind: Philosophy and History of Science”, (review of Howson Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31: 181–92.
• 1983a, “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability”, PSA 198: Proceedings of the 1982 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , edited by P. Asquith. and T. Nickles, East Lansing MI: Philosophy of Science Association: 669–88.
• 1983b, “Rationality and Theory Choice”, Journal of Philosophy 80: 563–70.
• 1987, “What are Scientific Revolutions?”, in The Probabilistic Revolution edited by L. Krüger, L. Daston, and M. Heidelberger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 7–22. Reprinted in Kuhn 2000: 13–32.
• 1990, “Dubbing and Redubbing: The Vulnerability of Rigid Designation”, in Scientific Theories edited by C. Savage, Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science 14, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press: 298–318.
• 1991a, “The Road Since Structure”, PSA 1990. Proceedings of the 1990 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association vol.2 , edited by A. Fine, M. Forbes, and L. Wessels., East Lansing MI: Philosophy of Science Association: 3–13.
• 1991b, “The Natural and the Human Sciences”, in The Interpretative Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture , edited by D. Hiley, J. Bohman, and R. Shusterman, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press: 17–24.
• 1992, “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science”, Robert and Maurine Rothschild Distinguished Lecture, 19 November 1991, An Occasional Publication of the Department of the History of Science, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• 1993, “Afterwords” in World Changes. Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science , edited by P. Horwich, Cambridge MA: MIT Press: 311–41.

Other references and secondary literature

• Andersen, H., 2001, On Kuhn , Belmont CA: Wadsworth.
• Andersen, H., P. Barker, and X. Chen, 1996, “Kuhn’s mature philosophy of science and cognitive psychology”, Philosophical Psychology , 9: 347–63.
• Andersen, H., P. Barker, and X. Chen, 1998, “Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions and cognitive psychology”, Philosophical Psychology , 11: 5–28.
• Andersen, H., P. Barker, and X. Chen, 2006, The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Barnes, B., 1982, T.S.Kuhn and Social Science , London: Macmillan.
• Barsalou, L. W.. 1992, “Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields”, in A. Lehrer and E. F. Kittay, (eds.) Frames, Fields, and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organization , Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 21–74
• Bird, A., 2000, Thomas Kuhn , Chesham: Acumen and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Bird, A., 2005, “Naturalizing Kuhn”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 105: 109–27.
• Bird, A., 2007, “Incommensurability naturalized”, in L. Soler, H. Sankey, and P. Hoyningen-Huene (eds.), Rethinking Scientific Change and Theory Comparison (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 255), Dordrecht: Springer, 21–39.
• Bruner, J. and Postman, L., 1949, “On the Perception of incongruity: A paradigm”, Journal of Personality , 18: 206–23.
• Cohen, I. B., 1985, Revolution in Science , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Devitt, M., 1979, “Against incommensurability”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 57: 29–50.
• Doppelt, G., 1978, “Kuhn’s epistemological relativism: An interpretation and defense”, Inquiry , 21: 33–86;
• Enç, B. 1976, “Reference and theoretical terms”, Noûs , 10: 261–82.
• Evans, G. 1973 “The causal theory of names”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 47: 187–208.
• Fuller, S. 2000, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for our Times , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Gutting, G., 1980, Paradigms and Revolutions , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Hacking, I. (ed.), 1981, Scientific Revolutions , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hacking, I. (ed.), 1993, “Working in a new world: The taxonomic solution”, in Horwich 1993, 275–310.
• Hanson, N. R., 1958, Patterns of Discovery , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Horwich, P. (ed.), 1993, World Changes. Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science , Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• Hoyningen-Huene, P., 1989, Die Wissenschaftsphilosophie Thomas S. Kuhns: Rekonstruktion und Grundlagenprobleme , translated as Hoyningen-Huene, P., 1993, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Hoyningen-Huene, P., 1990, “Kuhn’s conception of incommensurability” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A , 21: 481–92.
• Hung, E. H.-C., 2006, Beyond Kuhn. Scientific Explanation, Theory Structure, Incommensurability and Physical Necessity , Aldershot: Ashgate.
• Kindi, V., 1995, Kuhn and Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigation of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Athens: Smili editions.
• Kripke, S., 1980, Naming and Necessity , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kroon, F. 1985, “Theoretical terms and the causal view of reference”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 63: 143–66.
• Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (eds.), 1970, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge , London: Cambridge University Press.
• Longino, H., 1994, “In search of feminist epistemology”, Monist , 77: 472–85.
• Margolis, H., 1987, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgment , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Margolis, H., 1993, Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Martin, E., 1991, “The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female sex roles”, Signs , 16: 485–501. Reprinted in E. Keller and H. Longino (eds.), 1996, Feminism and Science , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Masterman, M., 1970. “The nature of a paradigm”, in Lakatos and Musgrave 1970, 59–89.
• Mizrahi, M. (ed.), 2018, The Kuhnian Image of Science , London: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Musgrave, A., 1971, “Kuhn’s second thoughts”, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science , 22: 287–97.
• Nagel, E. 1961, The Structure of Science , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Nelson, L. H., 1993, “Epistemological communities”, in L. Alcoff and E. Potter (eds.), Feminist Epistemologies , New York: Routledge.
• Nersessian, N., 1987, “A cognitive-historical approach to meaning in scientific theories”, in N. Nersessian (ed.) The Process of Science , Dordrecht: Kluwer, 161–77.
• Nersessian, N., 2003, “Kuhn, conceptual change, and cognitive science”, in Nickles 2003a, 178–211.
• Newton-Smith, W., 1981, The Rationality of Science , London: Routledge.
• Nickles, T., 2003a (ed.), Thomas Kuhn , Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
• Nickles, T., 2003b, “Normal science: From logic to case-based and model-based reasoning”, in Nickles 2003a, 142–77.
• Nola, R., 1980, “Fixing the Reference of Theoretical Terms”, Philosophy of Science , 47: 505–31.
• Pickering, A., 1984, Contructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Popper, K., 1959, The Logic of Scientific Discovery , London: Hutchinson.
• Putnam, H., 1975a, Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers Vol. 2 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Putnam, H., 1975b, “The meaning of ‘meaning’” in Putnam 1975a.
• Renzi, B. G., 2009, “Kuhn’s evolutionary epistemology and its being undermined by inadequate biological concepts”, Philosophy of Science , 58: 143–59.
• Rosch, E., 1973, “On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories”, in T. E. Moore (ed.) Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language , New York NY: Academic, 111–44.
• Rosch, E. and Mervis C. B., 1975, “Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structures of categories”, Cognitive Psychology , 7: 573–605.
• Sankey, H., 1993, “Kuhn’s changing concept of incommensurability”, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science , 44: 759–74.
• Sankey, H., 1994, The Incommensurability Thesis , Aldershot: Avebury.
• Scheffler, I., 1967, Science and Subjectivity , Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
• Schiebinger, L., 1999, Has Feminism Changed Science? , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Shapere, D., 1964, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Philosophical Review , 73: 383–94.
• Sharrock, W. and Read, R., 2002, Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution , Cambridge: Polity.
• Siegel, H., 1980 “Objectivity, rationality, incommensurability and more”, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science , 31: 359–84.
• Toulmin, S., 1970 “Does the distinction between normal and revolutionary science hold water?”, in Lakatos and Musgrave 1970, 39–5.
• Wray, K. B., 2011, Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Thomas Kuhn—A Snapshot by Frank Pajares
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—An Outline and Study Guide by Frank Pajares
• Guide to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Malcolm R. Forster
• Thomas Kuhn (Wikipedia)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Wikipedia)
• Obituary in The New York Times by Lawrence Van Gelder

epistemology: evolutionary | epistemology: social | feminist philosophy, interventions: epistemology and philosophy of science | Feyerabend, Paul | incommensurability: of scientific theories | Lakatos, Imre | Popper, Karl | Quine, Willard Van Orman | rationality: historicist theories of | reference | relativism | scientific knowledge: social dimensions of | scientific realism | Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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