Context of discovery and context of justification [1987]

Encyclopedia of Science Education, 2013

Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World, 2013

It has become common to use "positivist" and "positivism" as words of opprobrium. Positivists are rigid, unimaginative, committed to an unrealistic separation of fact and value. So understood, the epithet may fit some scientists, both past and present. And one might justly think of positivism's legacy as a bad philosophical hangover. But this understanding mischaracterizes the original positivists. First I sketch what the original positivists were about and indicate both strengths and shortcomings of the views they advocated. Then, I suggest an alternative approach to thinking about the nature of knowledge in science that retains some of positivism's original aspirations without the overreach that was its downfall.

Drawing on the recent revisionary scholarship regarding logical positivism and its relation to the early post-positivism, I display and question the standard historical understanding of the analytical philosophy of science from the late 1920s to the mid-1970s. I then propose an alternative account based on the internal-external distinction. I conclude by showing some advantages of my alternative narrative that does more justice to the logical positivism than the standard understanding and suggest some further lines of research that it opens up.

2016

We have seen earlier that post-Renaissance development of science relied, to a large extent, on empirical evidence in order to dispel common misconceptions held since antiquity. Francis Bacon advised scientists to gather empirical data on a large scale. In order to build a more complex body of knowledge from these direct observations, he recommended the use of inductive reasoning (making generalizations based on individual instances). This approach saw quite a bit of success in the following century. Thus, the mood of the time was to rely on empirical evidence in judging truth. This line of thinking was formalized by John Locke and David Hume in England, by theorizing that all knowledge derives from sense experience. This point of view, called empiricism, says that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced. All rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience, also called a posteriori knowledge. But what i...

Natural Sciences and Human Thought, 1995

The relationship between natural sciences and human thought has long been at the centre of philosophical debate and has of course been the subject of a variety of interpretations. Beginning in the middle of last century developments in scientific disciplines accelerated the dissolution of the idealist and positivist synthesis and opened the way for a (partially) new role for philosophy: the critical analysis of the results and the methodologies of science. In this century neo-Kantian discussions about the conditions determining the possibility of scientific knowledge, the neopositivist analysis of scientific theories, phenomenological attempts to achieve a closer grasp of reality, sociological emphasis on the role of shared values, and linguistic explanations have shared the stage to various degrees. In addition, far-reaching criticism of the general scientific approach to knowledge and of its technological implications has stressed the limits not only of the scientific concept of truth but also, and more radically, the possibility of the subject's access to "rational" knowledge free of historically determined values, interests, emotions, and feelings. From this point of view man's very nature precludes the possibility of critical enquiry based on rational criteria of extratemporal validity. Controversial postmodernist trends stress differences rather than unity and localize and relativize values and meanings. There is a widespread belief that "the positive knowledge of science may not ultimately be for the best, as the downside of scientifically produced military and industrial technics becomes quite unavoidably apparent" [1]. All these philosophical trends have had an influence on history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Historiography, still based on a linear, cumulative, positivist approach at the beginning of the century, shifted in the 1960s toward more sophisticated rational reconstructions in the form of the dynamics of research programs, only to be challenged by intellectual history and the history of ideas, on the one hand and by the sociology of institutions and, more recently, the sociology of knowledge, on the other. New cultural, anthropological, archaeological, and "gender" studies are coming forward, while textual analysis

2016