On how the distinction between history and philosophy of science should not be drawn

✍ Scribed by C. Ulises Moulines

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1983
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 646 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1876-2514
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00174787

✦ Synopsis

Philosophy and history of science both belong to the sciences of culture: they both study that cultural phenomenon that we call "science". Speaking in very general terms, both disciplines have the same subject matter, namely the bulk of science. Speaking in more particular terms, they still appear to coincide in their subjects: namely, particular components of science, like concepts, principles, methods, theories and research programs. Consequently, here we have two disciplines, history and philosophy of science, that have, in principle at least, the same object of study. It is then a sensible question to ask what their essential difference is or should be. Of course, we could ask the very same question with respect to any pair of disciplines that happen to deal with the same subject. But, what makes our question especially interesting from a methodological point of view is the growing tendency within philosophy of science to take history very seriously and the less generalized, but also genuine conviction among some historians of science that logico-methodological questions matter. Now, when a non--negligible portion of two academic communities begin to feel that their respective disciplines have important connections, the time has come to ask what the precise nature of these connections is, and in order to be able to answer this question, we first must ask what the difference between their respective tasks is.

A first possible short answer to this question is that the difference is none. Though logically this would be the first possible answer we should examine, for reasons of "conceptual dialectics" I shall leave it for a later stage in the discussion.

Another possible short answer is that the difference between history and philosophy of science is the difference between a something and a nothing, or between a meaningful activity and nonsense. This view is undoubtedly in the minds of quite a few historians and sociologists of science, though it might not be clearly expressed for obvious reasons of academic diplomacy. It is also a view held by some masochistic philosophers of science. Feyerabend, for example, though he uses the language of the philosophers of science and addresses himself to the kind of questions that "standard"