Historiography and the Philosophy of the Sciences (original) (raw)
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International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2017
In this article, I explore the value of philosophy of science for history of science. I start by introducing a distinction between two ways of integrating history and philosophy of science: historical philosophy of science (HPS) and philosophical history of science (PHS). I then offer a critical discussion of Imre Lakatos’s project to bring philosophy of science to bear on historical interpretation. I point out certain flaws in Lakatos’s project, which I consider indicative of what went wrong with PHS in the past. Finally, I put forward my own attempt to bring out the historiographical potential of philosophy of science. Starting from Norwood Russell Hanson’s insight that historical studies of science involve metascientific concepts, I argue that philosophical reflection on those concepts can be (and, indeed, has been) historiographically fruitful. I focus on four issues (epistemic values, experimentation, scientific discovery and conceptual change) and discuss their significance and utility for historiographical practice.
Springer Handbook of the Historiography of Science
Springer Handbook of the Historiography of Science - Call for Contributions. A new book in the Springer Series on the Historiographies of Science seeks proposals for chapters. Title: Handbook of the Historiography of Science Guest Editors: Mauro L. Condé (Federal University of Minas Gerais), Marlon Salomon (Federal University of Goiás) Springer Book Series: https://www.springer.com/series/15837
A theory of historiography as a pre-science
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1993
I DIFFERENTIATE between historiogruphy, the written product of historians (Historie in German); and history, the collective past of humanity and the subject matter of historiography (Geschichte in German). This is an essay about a theory of historiography. The minimum task of historiographic literature is to produce true statements about history.' Naive empiricist historians prided themselves on being the mouthpieces of the historical past, writing 'just what happened'. The historical past was supposed to be the author of historiography, while the historian presumed to be the living hand of the dead past. The reliability of historiographic accounts was supposed to be the product of the reliability of the evidence. Modern, called by its practitioners 'scientific', historiography was founded by Ranke who went beyond the previous critical reading of narrative accounts, written by contemporaries of the studied period, into reading original non-narrative documents in European archives. Ranke's assumption was that the best historical evidence comes from primary sources, not distorted by being put into sometimes misleading narrative form. Contemporary Histoire des Mentalit&, as has been developed mainly in the Annales school, attempts, in a sense, to be more Rankeian than Rankeian classical historiography by studying those aspects of the past that were repressed and thus maintained their pristine undistorted truth: histories of madness, untruth, taboo, automatisms of behavior, thoughts and actions regarding life and death, beliefs and rituals.* Nagele points to the similarity between the historian and the psychoanalyst in their relationship to the evidence: both share a free 'hovering' attention to the evidence, a total ideological suppression, at the price of eliminating a *My research has been helped by a grant from the Research Support Scheme of the Prague Central European University.'
Historicism and Science Studies
One way to understand the diverse discourse known as science studies is to consider the ways in which different camps and theorists think (or do not think) the question of history, and to consider how historical theories and methods connect with epistemologies and the possibilities for critical discourse regarding science. Can the question of historical method or theory serve as a useful guide to the discourse, perhaps even a better index for considering the issue of critical engagement, than epistemological conviction (or lack thereof)? I will explore the issue by considering the historical methods and theories of history of several interlocutors located within the discourse of science studies, in order to illustrate the possibilities for this approach. As the discussion should make clear, the historical approach is productive of comparative reading of interlocutors in terms of the possibilities for a critical discursive relationship to their objects of knowledge, as well as for demonstrating the relationship between historical method and theory, and epistemology.