Science as It Could Have Been
Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem
Published on 19. February 2016
473 pages
978-0-8229-8115-2 (ISBN)
Description
Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental data, ontological commitments, and so forth have been significantly different? Science as It Could Have Been focuses on a crucial issue that contemporary science studies have often neglected: the issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplines-physics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychology-to explore whether components of human science are inevitable, or if we could have developed an alternative successful science based on essentially different notions, conceptions, and results. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors in philosophy, sociology, and history of science, this edited volume offers a comprehensive analysis of the contingency/inevitability problem and a lively and up-to-date portrait of current debates in science studies.
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Lena Soler | Emiliano Trizio | Andrew Pickering
Science as It Could Have Been
Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem
Book
11/2015
University of Pittsburgh Press
€63.00
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Persons
Lena Soler (Editor)
Léna Soler is associate professor of philosophy of science at the University of Lorraine. She is the author of Introduction à l'épistémologie and editor of Science after the Practice Turn in the Philosophy, History, and Social Studies of Science.
Emiliano Trizio (Editor)
Emiliano Trizio is an instructor of philosophy of science at Seattle University.
Andrew Pickering (Editor)
Andrew Pickering is professor of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Constructing Quarks, The Mangle of Practice, and The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future.
Léna Soler is associate professor of philosophy of science at the University of Lorraine. She is the author of Introduction à l'épistémologie and editor of Science after the Practice Turn in the Philosophy, History, and Social Studies of Science.
Emiliano Trizio (Editor)
Emiliano Trizio is an instructor of philosophy of science at Seattle University.
Andrew Pickering (Editor)
Andrew Pickering is professor of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Constructing Quarks, The Mangle of Practice, and The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. The Contingentist/Inevitabilist Debate: Current State of Play, Paradigmatic Forms of Problems and Arguments, Connections to More Familiar Philosophical Themes - Léna Soler
- Part I. Global Survey of the Problem Situation
- 1. Why Contingentists Should Not Care about the Inevitabilist Demand to "Put-Up-or-Shut-Up": A Dialogic Reconstruction of the Argumentative Network - Léna Soler
- 2. Some Remarks about the Definitions of Contingentism and Inevitabilism - Catherine Allamel-Raffin and Jean-Luc Gangloff
- Part II. Contingency, Ontology and Realism
- 3. Science, Contingency, and Ontology - Andrew Pickering
- 4. Scientific Realism and the Contingency of the History of Science - Emiliano Trizio
- 5. Contingency and Inevitability in Science: Instruments, Interfaces, and the Independent World - Mieke Boon
- Part III. In Search of a Concrete and Empirically Tractable Way of Framing the Contingentist/Inevitabilist Issue
- 6. Contingency and "The Art of the Soluble" - Harry Collins
- 7. Contingency, Conditional Realism, and the Evolution of the Sciences - Ronald N. Giere
- 8. Necessity and Contingency in the Discovery of Electron Diffraction - Yves Gingras
- Part IV. Contingency and Mathematics
- 9. Contingency in Mathematics: Two Case Studies - Jean Paul Van Bendegem
- 10. Freedom of Framework - Jean-Michel Salanskis
- 11. On the Contingency of What Counts as "Mathematics" - Ian Hacking
- Part V. Widening the Scope of Contingentist/Inevitabilist Targets: Scientific Practices and the Methodological, Material, Tacit, and Social Dimensions of Science
- 12. The Science of Mind as It Could Have Been: About the Contingency of the (Quasi-) Disappearance of Introspection in Psychology - Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin
- 13. Laws, Scientific Practice, and the Contingency/Inevitability Question - Joseph Rouse
- Part VI. Contingency and Scientific Pluralism
- 14. On the Plurality of (Theoretical) Worlds - Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
- 15. Cultivating Contingency: A Case for Scientific Pluralism - Hasok Chang
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
