The Historical Turn in the Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The history of science itself has a long history, often found as an introductory part of a scientist’s scientific writings (from Aristotle to Priestley). But only in the nineteenth century, with William Whewell, did the history of science begin to find its own place in academic life, a place not properly secured until the twentieth century, thanks largely to the pioneering efforts of George Sarton. Although Whewell intended history of science to furnish the materials against which a satisfactory philosophy of science could be constructed, philosophers of science in the first half of the twentieth century largely ignored the growing historical discipline. The principal reason for this failure of philosophers to engage with the history of science was the widespread acceptance of a distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification. The former concerns the circumstances and causes of a scientific development while the latter concerns its justification. The former may refer to historical and psychological data, but these are not relevant to the epistemic assessment of a hypothesis, which will refer, for example, to an a priori standard, such as Carnap’s inductive logic. Given this distinction, the normative function of philosophy of science, concerned with the context of justification, could ignore the factual historical domain of the context of discovery. This perspective was shared even by those, such as Popper, who rejected many of the assumptions of logical positivism.

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