Republic of the Philippines

Western Mindanao State University

College of Science and Mathematics

Physics Department

Synthesis Paper on Philosophy of Science

(Philo 108)

HISTORICIST CONCEPTIONS OF RATIONALITY: THE BATTLE OF THE BIG SYSTEMS

TITLE

Presented by:

Charlie H. Garcia

Presented to:

Prof. Elsa Saavedra

The Historical Turn in Philosophy of Science
Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1970a) was the original manifesto of
historicist philosophy of science and remains the primary reference point. His work, thus provide
the most useful platform for recounting early historicist efforts—and the difficulties they faced.
Kuhn had been anticipated in quite diverse ways by Kant, Hegel, William Whewell, Émile
Meyerson, Ernst Cassirer, Alexandre Koyré, Philipp Frank, Gaston Bachelard, Ludwik Fleck,
Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, W.V. Quine, Michael Polanyi, Hesse, Toulmin, and Hanson
and was immediately followed by Lakatos, Feyerabend, Shapere, Laudan, and others (see the
entry on Thomas Kuhn; also Hoyningen-Huene [1989] 1993 and Rheinberger [2007] 2010b).

The famous opening sentence of Structure was:

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a
decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. That image has
previously been drawn, even by scientists themselves, mainly from the study of finished
scientific achievements as these are recorded in the classics and, more recently, in the textbooks
from which each new scientific generation learns to practice its trade. Inevitably, however, the
aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no
more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn
from a tourist brochure or a language text. This essay attempts to show that we have been misled
by them in fundamental ways. Its aim is a sketch of the quite different concept of science that
can emerge from the historical records of the research activity itself.

Kuhn modeled the history of a science as a succession of dogmatic periods of “normal

science” under a “paradigm”, separated by “revolutionary” transitions to the next paradigm.
According to Kuhn such a break from the past rejuvenates a field that had stagnated under the
weight of anomalies that it no longer seemed to have the resources to solve. A new paradigm
introduces changes at all levels, from established databases and instrumentation to the conceptual
framework, goals, standards, institutional organization, and research culture—so much so that
some older practitioners can hardly recognize the new paradigm as their field. This, disconnect
produces “incommensurability” across paradigm change, ranging from communication failure to
problems of rational choice between the two, since there exists no fixed measure of success. At
his most radical, Kuhn modeled revolutionary decisions on political revolution at the community
level and on religious conversion at the individual level, adding that scientists on different sides
of a paradigm debate “live in different worlds” ([1962] 1970a: ch. 10). Under critical pressure,
he subsequently softened his position. In fact, he sought to clarify the notion of
incommensurability to the end of his life (Sankey 1997). Kuhn exemplifies the irony that, while
historicists used deep change as a weapon to beat up traditionalists, it presented serious problems
for the historicists themselves as well.
 Kuhn’s book was his attempt to answer the question posed by the above quotation. This
question immediately raised another: How can appeal to history achieve that transformative
change? In particular, how can descriptive claims about the past (or present science, for that
matter) affect our normative judgments about rational beliefs and behaviors? How can history
inform a methodology of science? This is a version of the so-called “is-ought” problem. Can
there really be a “judgment” of history?

Over the next decade or two, most philosophers of science came to agree that there was a
disconnect between science as historically practiced and the normative models of the received
philosophers. The historicists therefore presented the philosophical community with a
momentous dilemma: either rejected the most of science to date as irrational or else accept that
science is generally rational and use the historical information to revise our deeply entrenched
logical and probabilistic conception of rationality. Some positivists and Popperians attempted to
finesse option one by arguing that the history of science approximated the traditional view of
rationality closely enough if we treated their sanitized, abstract models of science as regulative
ideals. Kuhn and other historicists defended option two, taking the rationality of science to be
practically axiomatic. Wrote Kuhn,

“I do not for a moment believe that science is an intrinsically irrational enterprise …. I take this
assertion not as a matter of fact, but rather of principle. Scientific behavior, taken as a whole, is
the best example we have of rationality.” (1971: 143f; quoted by Hoyningen-Huhne [1989] 1993:
251f.)

What was Kuhn’s revised conception of rationality and how was it based on history (to
the degree that it was)? While he provided no explicit, general theory of rationality, Kuhn’s
challenge here was greater than many appreciate. The positivists and Popperians had practically
invented modern, academic philosophy of science. For them, scientific rationality was wholly a
matter of making correct theory acceptance decisions in context of justification, where the
hypotheses and test data are already on the table, the data are theory-neutral, and the goals and
standards are logically independent of theory. To Kuhn this picture of science was more like a
photographic negative in which light and dark are reversed. Let us count the ways.

(1) Although his work deepened the problem of underdetermination by insisting that logic plus
data is insufficient to determine theory choice, Kuhn reduced the magnitude of the problem of
justifying scientific claims by rejecting traditional realism and the correspondence theory of
truth. No longer must scientists justify a theoretical claim as true. Instead, he adopted the Kantian
critical position that no enterprise, including science, has the ability to establish the final,
metaphysical truth about the world. Instead, science is largely a problem-solving enterprise, and
scientists are in position to evaluate the goodness of proposed problem solutions, relative to
previous attempts. “[T]he unit of scientific achievement is the solved problem” ([1962] 1970a:
169). What demarcates science from nonscience and pseudoscience is sustained support (over
historical time) of a puzzle-solving tradition, not the application of a nonexistent “scientific
method” to determine whether the claims are true or false or probable to some degree. With
justified truth claims gone, new accounts of scientific discovery, knowledge, explanation, and
progress will also be needed.

(2) Contrary to most empiricist views, the data are not theory-neutral, hence not cumulative from
one period of science to another.

(3) Moreover, Kuhn extended the claim that observation is theory laden to say that all major
aspects of a science are laden by the others. Substantive data and theoretical claims,
methodological standards, goals, and even the social institutions of science are all bound up in
mutual dependence. (The received view had kept them separate and independent in order to
avoid mutual contamination allegedly leading to circularity; see Scheffler 1967.) It is this
internal feedback that introduces the interesting, nonlinear dynamics into Kuhn’s model, since
the feedback produces coupled interaction terms (Kuhn 1977: 336; Nickles 2013b; De Langhe
2014b).

(4) This tight coherence implies that normal science is conservative and closed, in contrast to
Popper’s science as an “open society” (Popper 1945). Contrary to tradition, said Kuhn, scientific
rationality does not consist in advancing hypotheses and testing them severely. To challenge the
constitutive pillars of a scientific field, as Popper and the positivists advocated, would destroy it,
for all theories and conceptual frameworks face potentially falsifying anomalies at all times
(Kuhn [1962] 1970a and 1970b; Lakatos 1970 agreed). Popper’s “critical rationalism”, the key to
Popper’s Enlightenment conception of political democracy as well as scientific advance, is
actually irrational; for such criticism would undercut the researchers’ reason for being.

(5) Kuhn claimed that Popper and others had missed the existence of key structures in the history
of science—the longer-term approaches that he called paradigms and hence both normal and
truly revolutionary science. There are different historical scales in play: individual theories,
paradigms, and the still longer-term perspective of a succession of paradigms. So Kuhn adopted
a two-tiered or double-process conception of science in which there is, first, a constitutive
framework (the paradigm), held immune to revision during periods of normal science, and,
second, change from one framework to another. For these frameworks are historically contingent
and are eventually displaced by others. Kuhn’s two-process account sharply clashed with the
one-process account of Popper (1963) and many others. Ironically, given that Kuhn was also
attacking positivist positions, and given his greater sympathy for Popper, the two-process
account was closer to the “positivists” Reichenbach and Carnap than to Popper (see Reisch 1991;
Carnap 1950; De Langhe 2014a,b; Nickles 2013a).

(6) Thus two different accounts of scientific rationality are required, not one: one to cover the
relatively smooth change within normal science under a single paradigm and the other to handle
radical paradigm change. This immediately implies that there are two basic types of scientific
change, hence two problems of scientific change and/or two problems of progress to be solved,
hence two accounts of scientific rationality needed to solve them. What were Kuhn’s
constructive claims?

(7) We should seek neither a single, neutral method of all science at all times nor an account
based on explicit methodological rules. Most normal scientific decisions are based on skilled
judgments, not rules (Kuhn [1962] 1970a: chs. 5, 10). The appearance of rules in scientific
practice is a sign of crisis, of breakdown. Contrary to tradition, neither, rationality within a
paradigm nor rational choice between paradigms is a matter of following rules. It is not the
application of a formal, logic- or probability-based algorithm. In both cases it is a matter of
skilled judgment (of different kinds).

(8) Informal scientific judgment depends heavily upon rhetoric and judgments of heuristic
fertility in the context of discovery—the very items that had been expressly excluded from the
context of rational justification by the dominant tradition. For Kuhn, normal problem solving is a
matter of modeling new puzzles solutions on established precedents, the exemplars, where
modeling crucially involves judgments of similarity, analogy, or metaphor. (Whereas Popper’s
methodology is a learning theory in which we learn only from our mistakes, in Kuhn’s we learn
also (mainly) from our successes—the exemplars, which, over time ratchet up our knowledge
within normal science.) In paradigm change, the rhetorical tropes used in persuasion are typically
more abstract and tenuous than in normal science. Kuhn’s account of the rational acceptance of
paradigm change had to remain thin because of incommensurability. Here the justification
problem was all the more difficult because new paradigms generally lose some of the successes
of their predecessors (so called “Kuhn loss” of problem solutions but also data, theory, goals, and
standards).

(9) Kuhn’s novel constructive move in dealing with the rationality of paradigm change was to
bring in a prospective dimension of heuristic fertility judgments. From the point of view of key,
creative scientists, the old paradigm has exhausted its resources, whereas radical new ideas and
practices can not only resolve some old anomalies (retrospective confirmation) but, equally
importantly, can reinvent and thereby preserve the field by opening up new frontiers with much
interesting new work to be done. For them the field now had a future. To be sure, heuristic
guidance was also a feature of normal science, but there it was built in implicitly.

In sum, Kuhn turned the traditional ideas of scientific justification, based on the
discovery-justification-context distinction, on their head. Ironically, once we take the research
scientists’ points of view, the more interesting forms of scientific cognition, including
justification, occur in contexts of discovery. All of this according to Kuhn.

Critics countered that, while the historicist upstarts had scored some damaging critical
points, their positive accounts of scientific rationality were underdeveloped, vague, and
unconvincing. Political revolution and religious conversion as models of rational behavior?!
Clark Glymour (1980: 7, 96ff) called the new approach “the new fuzziness”. Could intuitive
judgment really replace standard confirmation theory? And what would be the analogous relation
of evidence to theory at the metamethodological level, where now “theory” was the set of
methodological rules or theory of rationality itself? (Historicists replied that it is not their fault if

Real life decision-making is a messy business that often outruns available formal rules.) Shapere
(1984: chs. 3–5) was a severe early critic of Kuhn, and Lakatos (1970: 178) reported that Kuhn
had replaced rationality with “mob rule”. Since Shapere and Lakatos were historicists, we see
that the historicists could disagree sharply among themselves. Feyerabend will provide the most
vivid example.

Kuhn’s insightful treatment of science from the working scientists’ point of view
provided a microlevel conception of rational decision-making. But did he have a
metamethodological account of how to decide among competing theories of scientific
rationality? Again, not an explicit and comprehensive account, only some constructive
suggestions. Like all historicists, he said that a rationality theory must fit the history of science
and that the traditional accounts failed this history test. An adequate theory must also be
progressive and avoid epistemological relativism. Kuhn (and many others) simply built in these
norms from the outset. Such a move works well among most friends of historicism but not well
for critics, who think these presuppositions simply beg the normativity of history question. Given
incommensurability, are not rationality, progressiveness, and denial of relativism key items that
must be argued for? In other passages, Kuhn did argue for them, but few critics were convinced.

On the positive side, Kuhn made an epistemological economy claim.

[I]n its normal state … a scientific community is an immensely efficient instrument for solving
the problems or puzzles that its paradigms define. ([1962] 1970a: 166; cf. Wray 2011: ch. 7)

It is clear that Kuhn considered science more efficient on his own account than on
Popper’s, because the double process enables extreme specialization (Wray 2011; De Langhe
2014c). Indeed, traditional accounts fail Kuhn’s demarcation criterion—that a genuine science
supports a puzzle-solving tradition. Given Kuhn’s conviction that science is progressive in terms
of problem-solving success, predictive accuracy, simplicity (the reworking and streamlining of
problem-solving efficiency over time), and so on, it supposedly follows that his account makes
science both rational and non-relativistic. Critics disagreed.

There also seems to be a kind of transcendental argument strategy behind Kuhn’s

approach, as a response to the quasi-Kantian question: Given that science, as historically
practiced, is largely rational and progressive, but not in the standard way, how are its rationality
and progress possible? Supposedly, the study of the historical patterns will show the way.

Kuhn often described his two-process view as “Kant with moveable categories”.
Accordingly, there is also a dialectical, quasi-Hegelian reading: from the myriad of micro-
decisions by the community of scientists in a given field over time, with lots of fits and starts, a
progressive enterprise emerges, although not one that is teleologically converging on the
metaphysical truth about the universe or on any other “end”. However, on this view we have
abandoned the idea that individual scientific decisions are typically driven by an explicit concern
for rationality. In several areas of philosophy there are heated controversies about whether

Higher order emergents have genuine causal power and hence genuine explanatory force. To
that degree, it remains unclear what role the desire to be rational plays, as opposed to more
mundane motives. This problem arises for other historicists as well, as David Hull will note.

On rationality as socially emergent, we may jump ahead here to note that feminist
philosophers of science such as Helen Longino and Miriam Solomon have defended scientific
rationality as a socially emergent norm (Longino 1990, 2001; Solomon 2001). They thereby
address the question of how a naturalistic, science-as-practiced approach to scientific knowledge
can nonetheless have normative implications. However, they do not shy away from making
policy proposals for changing (improving) scientific practices and their supporting institutions.
On their accounts, some other factors, such as political/ideological ones, also socially emerge
and can have top-down causal efficacy on individual practitioners but without negating the
agency and autonomy of those individuals. Here familiar issues of “methodological
individualism” come into play. (See the entries on feminist epistemology and philosophy of
science, feminist perspectives on science, feminist social epistemology, and feminist political
philosophy.)

The vigorous attacks on Kuhn as a radical subjectivist and irrationalist who was
undermining not only philosophy but the Western intellectual tradition now look exaggerated,
but it is fair to say that the five big problem-complexes of normativity, incommensurability
(including meaning change), relativism, social knowledge, and deep but rational progressive
change are extremely difficult and remain open to debate today. For many philosophers of
science, relativism is the big bugaboo that must be defeated at all costs. For them, any view that
leads to even a moderate relativism is thereby reduced to absurdity. Historicist philosophers have
insisted on relativity to historical context but, with few exceptions, have made a sharp distinction
between relativity and outright relativism. Some critics have not found this distinction
convincing (see the entry on relativism, Kindi & Arabatzis 2012 and Richards & Daston 2016).

The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), edited by Lakatos and Alan Musgrave,
was a second major contribution to the historicism debate. This collection of articles, originating
from a 1965 London conference, was in significant respects a reaction to Kuhn; but it is
especially important for Lakatos’s own contribution to the volume, “Falsification and the
Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” (MSRP), an attempt to accommodate a
broadly Popperian perspective to some of Kuhn’s ideas and thereby to diverge from Popperian
orthodoxy. Lakatos had long favored an historical approach to the philosophy of mathematics
and science (see his 1976). One of his central concerns was to defend the rational continuity and
progressiveness of modern science from the challenge of radical change. Another was to fend off
charges of historical relativism.

Like Kuhn’s paradigms and Laudan’s research traditions (see below), the unit of rational
appraisal for Lakatos is not a single theory at a point in time; instead, it is a series of theories that
are rationally-connected moments in the development of an identifiable research program. In
MSRP these theories share a negative heuristic containing inviolable principles and a positive
heuristic that both provides a “protective belt” around the negative heuristic and guides future
research. The forward-looking heuristic element was, as for Kuhn, an important feature missing
from traditional accounts of science. In MSRP, research programs are evaluated as to their
progressiveness over historical time, i.e., which grows knowledge fastest. Lakatos’s measure of
knowledge growth is novel prediction, the advantage going to which program yields more novel
theoretical predictions and more confirmed novel predictions than its competitors. This is a
historicist position since determining whether something is a novel prediction requires detailed
knowledge of the historical context of discovery in which the predictive theory was produced
(Lakatos & Zahar 1976). Unfortunately, however, Lakatos’s falsificationism had become so
sophisticated that he could provide no rule for when it was rational to abandon a degenerating
research program that was being outstripped by a more progressive one; for scientists, he said,
may legitimately make risky choices. In any case, contrary to Kuhn, two or more research
programs may exist side-by-side. Lakatosian rationality does not dictate that researchers all join
the same program.

What is the relation between a theory of scientific rationality and a general methodology
of science? Like the Popperians from which he diverged, Lakatos held that methodologies are
theories of scientific rationality (Curtis 1986). Similarly, a metamethodology (tasked with
determining which methodology outperforms others) is identical with a metatheory of scientific
rationality. Lakatos’s metatheory recapitulates MSRP at the metalevel. According to Lakatos, his
meta-MSRP shows that MSRP defeats competing methodologies, because it provides the best fit
with the history of science in the sense that it renders the history of science maximally rational.
That is, MSRP makes rational sense of both the intuitively rational episodes and some that its
competitors have to exclude as externally caused deviations from the rational ideal. Indeed, it
predicts that some counterintuitive cases will be seen to be rational when examined closely.

Lakatos’s paper, “The History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions” (1971: 91)
opens with a promising paraphrase of Kant (previously used by Hanson (1962: 575, 580) and by
Herbert Feigl (1970: 4): “Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of
science without philosophy of science is blind”. However, his use of rational reconstructions of
supporting historical episodes—the science as it allegedly could have been done or should have
been done—made the actual science look more internally correct (according to MSRP) than it
was. Historians and philosophical critics replied sharply that this was not genuine history and
hence not a fair test (see Arabatzis forthcoming).

Lakatos and his followers (e.g., Worrall 1988, 1989) conceived MSRP as a fixed and
final methodology by contrast with Kuhn’s, Toulmin’s, and (eventually) Laudan’s changing
methodologies. The idea that all previous history of science was working up to this final
methodology that Lakatos was first to divine—the end-of-history for methodology, so to speak—
was one of the broadly Hegelian themes in Lakatos’s work. Another was that there is no instant
rationality as proposed by the formal approaches of standard confirmation theory. Writes Daniel
little (in the entry on philosophy of history) “Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent
reason and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history’s work is finished…
”. The owl of Minerva flies out at dusk. For Lakatos rational judgments can only be made
retrospectively. For example, one cannot judge an experiment as crucial at the time it occurs,
only in historical retrospect (1970: 154ff). Appraisals are made with hindsight. (See the entry on
Lakatos.)

Methodological Anarchism
In his early work Feyerabend (1962) appealed to historical cases to reject Hempel’s
account of explanation and Nagel’s parallel account of intertheoretic reduction (traditionally
postulated mechanisms of cumulative progress), on the ground that in actual historical practice
meaning change occurs from one major theory to its successor. Deducibility thus fails. It also
more obviously fails because the two theories are typically mutually inconsistent. Accordingly,
one cannot reason by traditional logical argument from one to the other. Feyerabend introduced
his own conception of incommensurability into this work. Anticipating his later broad pluralism,
early Feyerabend also extended the Popperian line on testing to a full-blown proliferationist
methodology. Competing theories should be multiplied and tested against each other, because
more empirical content is thereby brought to light than in testing theories in isolation. In his later
work, Feyerabend (1975, 1987, 1989) moved vehemently away from the positions of the Popper
school. He vigorously rejected the idea of a scientific method that makes science superior to
other cultural enterprises. According to his “methodological anarchism”, any so-called
methodological rule, including logical consistency, could be fruitfully violated in some contexts.
That said, his well-known slogan, “Anything goes”, was widely read as more radical than he
intended, given his playful interactions with his friend Lakatos.

This later Feyerabend declared that his primary aim was humanitarian, not
epistemological, so it was not his purpose to defend the rationality of science. His attack on
dogmatic, scientistic conservatism, both within and without scientific communities, has
methodological import, albeit negative import. Feyerabend was one of the first to stress the
strong historical contingency of scientific work, in context of justification as well as discovery,
and he defended this contingency at the methodological level as well. Thus there is no fixed
rationality of science. For example, Galileo (he argued in historical detail) introduced a new sort
of methodology, a new kind of rationality, partly via rhetorical deception, partly with arresting

applications of mathematics to basic mechanical phenomena. Galileo’s new vision happened to

win out, but there is no point in calling it either rational or irrational in any absolute sense.

Philosophers, retreating from concrete detail to their abstract formalisms, make science
look far more rational than it is, stressed Feyerabend. “[H]istory, not argument, undermined the
gods”, and also undermined Aristotelian science and several later scientific orthodoxies (1989:
397, his emphasis). Feyerabend rejected “the separability thesis”, according to which a highly
contingent historical processes can furnish scientific products that are true and non-contingent,
products that have achieved escape velocity from history as it were (my expression). However,
although not as pronounced as in Lakatos, there remain traces of historicist consequentialism in
Feyerabend’s view, as when he wrote that “scientific achievements can be judged only after the
event” ([1975] 1993: 2). There is no “theory” of scientific rationality in Feyerabend, only a
historicist anti-theory, as it were; but he was not quite the irrationalist that critics took him to be.
(See the entry on Feyerabend. For recent work on historical contingency, see Stanford 2006 and
Soler et al. 2015.)

Feyerabend embraced the relativism implied by the positions just described. In a late
work, Science as Art, influenced by the prominent Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, he spoke
of distinct, self-contained scientific styles at different periods that are much like the distinct
styles in art (Ginzburg 1998). Such a view fit well with his sometime assertion that there is no
scientific progress, just a succession or multiplicity of styles. Here there is a faint connection to
Kuhn’s early views, although the two men reportedly did not interact as much as one might
expect while both were at Berkeley.

The Pragmatic, Problem-Solving Approach

Laudan opened Progress and Its Problems (1977) with the claim that providing an
adequate model of rationality is the primary business of the philosopher of science but that no
extant methodologies fit actual science. In this book his idea of good fit was fit with a selection
of intuitively strong historical instances that any adequate theory must explain. (Laudan 1984
and 1996: ch. 7, later rejected the intuitionistic elements that gave normative punch to this
model.) His response to the rationality question was to propose a thoroughgoing, explicitly
pragmatic, problem-solving account of science. Problem-solving had been an important element
in previous accounts, notably those of Kuhn and Popper, but Laudan reversed the usual account
of scientific progress as a temporal succession of atemporal rational decisions. Instead of
defining progress in terms of rationality, we should define rationality in terms of progress. We
cannot measure progress in terms of approach to an unknowable, final, metaphysical truth, but
we do have reliable markers of progress in terms of numbers and relative importance of both
empirical and conceptual problems solved by long-term “research traditions”. Just as Lakatos’s
research programs were a compromise between Popper and Kuhn, we can read Laudan’s
“research traditions” as incorporating elements of his major historicist predecessors, while
departing sharply from other tenets of their work.

Many analysts have played with possible relationships between the sciences’ assumed
rationality and assumed progressiveness. The central issue for them is analogous to the question
in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella: Is science progressive because it’s rational, or is it
rational because it’s progressive? (Kuhn [1962] 1970a: 162, had asked: Does a field make
progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?”) The underlying
question is whether rationality is basic and fundamental rather than derivative to something else.
Those like Laudan who make it derivative need to defend their position against the objection that
they are committing a verificationist fallacy of confusing rationality itself (its constitutive nature)
with the criteria for applying the term ‘rational’. Are momentary success or longer-term progress
constitutive of rationality or merely consequential indicators of it (or neither)?

Be that as it may, since progress is a historical (history-laden) concept, so is rationality on

Laudan’s conception, as it was on Lakatos’s. The temporality of his account led Laudan to
introduce an important distinction between acceptance of a theory and pursuit that would explain
how rational transitions to a new research tradition are possible. Scientists should accept the
theory that, pro tem, has the greatest overall problem-solving success, but pursue the tradition
that now enjoys a higher rate of success. Nearly everyone today accepts a distinction of this sort,
although not necessarily Laudan’s criteria of success.

Like Structure and MSRP, Laudan’s model of science received much discussion, both
constructive and critical. It faced the usual difficulties of how we are to count and weigh the
importance of problems in order to have a viable accounting scheme. Historicists can reply that it
is not their fault if this is a messy task, since that is just historical reality, a reality that, if
anything, favors expert judgment over tidy decision algorithms.

Laudan (1984) agreed with Kuhn that the goals, standards, and methods of science
change historically as well as the theoretical and observational claims, but his “reticulationist
model” rejected as historically inaccurate Kuhn’s claim that sometimes they all change together
to constitute a (Kuhnian) revolution. Dramatic change in one place need not seriously disturb
fixity elsewhere and rarely or never does. Hence, incommensurability is a pseudo-problem.
Moreover, Laudan contended, his reticulationist model overcomes the hierarchical problem that
has led thinkers such as Poincaré and Popper to make the goals of science arbitrary (the top of
the hierarchy and hence the unjustified justifier of what comes below), e.g., mere conventions.
These authors have no way to rationally appraise the goals themselves, leaving their positions
stuck with an account of merely instrumental reason: efficiency relative to a given, arbitrary
goal. By contrast, in Laudan’s model, the elements are mutually constraining, mutually
adjusting, an idea prominent in Dewey’s attack on hierarchy in his 1939. None takes absolute
precedence over the others. Thus, some goals are irrational because present and foreseeable
knowledge and methods have no way to achieve them or to measure progress toward them.

(Laudan thereby rejected strong realist goals as irrational.) An advance in substantive or

methodological expertise can make it rational to embrace new standards and also new goals.

The debate between Laudan and Worrall over the value of a fixed methodology of
science wonderfully exemplifies the persistence of the ancient problem of change (Laudan 1989;
Worrall 1989). How is it possible to explain, or even to measure, change except in terms of an
underlying fixity? Doesn’t allowing change at all three of Laudan’s levels—matters of scientific
fact and theory, method and standards, and goals—leave us with a damaging relativism? Worrall
defends the fixity of Lakatos’s MSRP but agrees that it cannot be established a priori. Laudan’s
reticulated model retains a more piecemeal and historically contingent fixity, as described above.

With all that said, the threat of relativism remains, for how can a good, non-whiggish
historicist have a trans-historical measure of progress? Laudan’s answer was that we can
whiggishly measure scientific progress by our own standards, regardless of what the goals of the
historical investigators were. This sounds right about what we do. But if the reasons why the
historical scientists in the trenches made the decisions they did do not really matter to us (or to
any given generation), retrospectively, then how is rationality providing a methodological guide
or causal explanation why historical scientists made the decisions they did? Their individual
rationality would seem to become irrelevant. And why, then, is rationality the central problem of
philosophy of science?

Departing sharply from traditional, non-naturalistic treatments of norms, Laudan

addressed the is-ought problem head-on by advancing an important and influential, pragmatic
“normative naturalism” whereby the acceptable norms are those best supported by successful
historical practice—where, again, success is as we judge it today. On this view, norms have
empirical content. They are winnowed from the history of successful practice, again a broadly
Deweyan idea (e.g., Dewey 1929). At Virginia Tech Laudan and colleagues initiated a program
to test the individual norms present in various philosophical models of science against the history
of science (Laudan 1977: 7; Donovan et al. 1988). Like every major philosophical proposal, this
one came under critical fire, in this case, e.g., for isolating individual methodological rules from
their historical contexts and for reverting to a traditional, positivistic, hypothetico-deductive
model of testing. In short, critics complained that Laudan’s metatheory of rationality did not
match his first-order, problem-solving-progress theory of rationality. And professional historians
did not welcome this invitation to cooperation, since the project implied a division of labor that
regarded philosophers as the theoreticians proposing rules to test, while the historians were
relegated to fact-grubbing handmaidens doing the testing. To be fair, as a historicist philosopher,
Laudan himself had done a good deal of historical work.
 On another front, Laudan’s (1981) attempt to “confute” scientific realism on the basis of
historical examples of major scientific change stimulated much discussion, since the status of
realism had become a central issue in philosophy of science. Indeed, Laudan’s article helped to
make it so.

Evolutionary Models of Scientific Development

Toulmin (1972) produced an evolutionary model of scientific development in terms of
populations of concepts, a gradualist account of scientific change that he considered more
historically accurate and philosophically defensible than Kuhn’s discontinuous model. Toulmin’s
“concepts” are historically malleable, yet they are characterized by historicity. He quotes
Kierkegaard: “Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of
withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals” (1972: frontispiece). Toulmin held that
biological, social, and conceptual evolution, including scientific development, are all instances of
the same generalized variation-selection-transmission schema, albeit with quite different
concrete implementations. For Toulmin, disciplines (specialties) are analogous to biological
species. He touted his model as naturalistic, indeed ecological, but not in a way that excludes
rationality. Rationality enters primarily at the selection level, determining which families of
concepts (including methodological ones) get selected and reproduced. Rationality is not a
matter of “logicality”, i.e., of sticking to a given logical or Kuhnian framework through thick and
thin. Rather, it is a matter of adapting appropriately to changing circumstances. Like Newtonian
force, rationality has to do with change, not maintenance of the same state. Thus no Kuhnian
revolution is needed in order to break out of an old conceptual framework.

As for the descriptive-normative problem, thinkers from Kuhn to Robert Brandom (e.g.,
2002: 13, 230ff) have appealed to the common law tradition as an instructive analogy, and
Toulmin was no exception. Published legal cases provide legal precedents that later legal
argumentation can cite for support. Over time, normative traditions emerge. Explicit rules may
be formulated by reflecting on the history of precedents, but the practices typically remain
implicit. There is a whiff of Hegelian, retrospective reconstruction in this idea of extracting
norms from patterned historical practices that embody them implicitly and contingently. The
main trouble with Toulmin’s account, said critics, is that it is so vague and abstract that it tells us
little about how science works. It would seem to apply to just about everything.

Donald Campbell (1960, 1974) had previously defended the generalized variation plus
selective retention schema, which he traced back to William James. Popper regarded his own
evolutionary account of scientific development as similar to Campbell’s (1974). Ditto for David
Hull (1988) with his more detailed evolutionary model. However, Hull rejected evolutionary
epistemology, as such, and denied that he was doing epistemology at all. (Evolutionary
epistemologies face the problem of why we should expect a contingent selectionist process to be
truth-conducive: see the entry on evolutionary epistemology. Assuming that it is can also tempts
one to fall into whiggism regarding the past in a social Darwinist sort of way.) Hull rejected
Toulmin’s biological species analogy, as based only on feature-similarity rather than on the
historical-causal continuity of genuine biological species. Hull’s book reflected his own deep
involvement in the controversy between cladists, evolutionary systematicists, and pheneticists
over biological classification. (He served terms as president of both the Society for Systematic

Biology and the Philosophy of Science Association.) Hull generalized his important biological
concepts of replicator (gene) and interactor (organism) to scientists and communities. His central
unit of and for analysis was the deme, or research group, in its competition with others.

Hull (1988) argued that the success of science can be explained by an invisible hand
mechanism rather than in terms of rational decision-making. He did not deny that most scientists
regard themselves as rational truth seekers, but on his account the primary motivation is the drive
for professional recognition and credit via positive citation by others, and avoidance of violations
of institutionalized standards. The term ‘rationality’ does not even appear in the book’s index.
Nonetheless, the institutional incentive structure of science works to produce generally reliable
results and scientific progress, so that, to rationality-minded philosophers, science looks as if it is
driven by the intentional rationality of its practitioners. We might say that, for Hull, rationality
explains nothing without causal backing, but once we bring the causal mechanisms into play,
there is no longer a need to foreground rationality, at least not intentional rationality.

The better [scientists] are at evaluating the work of others when it is relevant to their own
research, the more successful they will be. The mechanism that has evolved in science that is
responsible for its unbelievable success may not be all that “rational”, but it is effective, and it
has the same effect that advocates of science as a totally rational enterprise prefer. (1988: 4)

Like Adam Smith’s view of the invisible hand regarding altruism and the public good,
rationalists can interpret Hull’s account as broadly Hegelian in the sense that the rationality of
science emerges (insofar as it does) from the complex social interactions of scientists and groups
of scientists going about their normal business in ordinary ways that satisfy community norms
and incentive structures, not from their explicit intentions to make rational decisions. While Hull
gave close attention to these social interactions and to the institutions that enable them, he
claimed that his appeal to social factors was internal to science rather than external.

New-Wave Sociology of Science and the Realist Reaction

Left relatively untouched by historicist philosophers during the Battle of the Big Systems
was the internal/external distinction. The philosophers, consonant with traditional sociology of
science (e.g., Merton 1973) and sociology of knowledge more generally, defended a kind of
“inertial principle” (Fuller 1989: xiii et passim): social and psychological factors such as
economic and political interests and psychological dispositions should be brought into play only
to explain deviation from the rational path. This distinction began to erode already in Kuhn, who
stressed the social factors internal to the organization of science itself: science education, the
strong role of scientific communities with their distinctive cultures, etc. (See also Lakatos on
comprehensive theories of rationality that can turn apparent external considerations into internal
ones, and Hull 1988 on career advancement.)

In the 1970s, new-wave sociologists of science quickly rejected the division of labor
implied by the inertial principle and took sociology far beyond where Kuhn had left it (much to
his chagrin). These sociologists insisted that sociology, via social interests and other social
motivational causes, had much to say about the internal, technical content of science—so much,
in fact, that it was not clear that there was any room left for the rational explanations of the
philosophers. The Edinburgh Strong Programme founded by David Bloor and Barry Barnes (see
Bloor 1976), the Bath relativist school of Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch (Collins 1981), and
later constructivist work of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979), Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981),
Steve Shapin (1982), Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985), and Andy Pickering (1984) were
important early developments. (See Shapin 1982 for a helpful discussion.)

Since the new sociology of science was also heavily based on historical case studies, we
find more radical historicisms challenging less radical ones. Although the sociologists often
disagreed among themselves, as the philosophers did, the general thrust of their work was that
the philosophical historicists had failed to take socio-political context into account and thus were
still too much wedded to the old, abstract, acausal ideals of rationality, objectivity, and progress
toward truth. Much sociological work was explicitly anti-realist and relativist, at least as a
methodology.

Most philosophers of science strongly rejected the new sociology as relativist and
irrationalist, the non-historicists among them adopting versions of strong realism, according to
which mature science can knowingly, on internalist grounds, arrive at theoretical truth and
genuine reference to theoretical entities, or closely enough. The eventual upshot was “the
Science Wars” of the 1990s. By now (2017), the sides in this dispute have mellowed, fruitful
conversations are taking place, and some degree of reconciliation has occurred (see Labinger &
Collins 2001). Work by feminists in science studies such as Donna Haraway (2004) and feminist
philosophers of science such as Helen Longino (1990, 2001) and Miriam Solomon (2001) have
rejected assumptions common to both sides in the debate, thereby opening the way to their more
pluralistic, interactive, and less hierarchical options. Distinct prominent approaches to social
epistemology by philosophers include Fuller 1988, Goldman 1999, and Rouse 2002. (See the
entries on social epistemology, scientific method, scientific realism, and the social dimensions of
science as well as the feminist entries referenced above.)

Some of the sociological work had a postmodern cast, and so did contributions by some
philosophers. For example, Richard Rorty’s version of historicist pragmatism rejected
correspondence theories of truth and the related idea that we humans have some naturalized-
theological obligation faithfully to represent metaphysical nature with our science. He spoke
suggestively but vaguely of major transformations in the sciences (or anywhere else in culture),
such as that achieved by Galileo, as the invention of a new “vocabulary” that worked well
enough for certain purposes to catch on, but not as new truths established by logical reasoning.
As for rationality itself, it is a matter of maintaining an honest, civil “conversation”:

On a pragmatist view, rationality is not the exercise of a faculty called “reason”—a

faculty which stands in some determinate relation to reality. Nor is [it] the use of a method. It is
simply a matter of being open and curious, and of relying on persuasion rather than force. (1991:
62).

So rationality is not the key to scientific success, and it has as much to do with rhetoric as
with logic. Pragmatists, he said, prefer to speak of the success or failure of problem-solving
efforts, rather than rationality or irrationality (1991: 66).

A view sometimes ascribed to Rorty’s hero Dewey is that rationality is not an a priori,
universal method of thinking and acting properly; rather, it is like a box of intellectual tools, each
of which, as humans have learned from craft experience, work better than others in various
situations, the result being what might be called a “teleonormative” conception of rationality.
Notes
1. Labinger, Jay A. & Harry Collins (eds.), 2001, The One Culture? A Conversation about
Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2. Lakatos, Imre, 1970, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes”, in Lakatos & Musgrave 1970: 91–195. Reprinted in Lakatos 1978: 8–101.
3. Lakatos, Imre & Alan Musgrave (eds.), 1970, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Lakatos, Imre & Elie Zahar, 1976, “Why did Copernicus’s Programme Supersede
Ptolemy’s?”, in Lakatos 1978: 168–192.
5. Latour, Bruno, 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through
Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6. Latour, Bruno & Steve Woolgar, 1979, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
Facts, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
7. Laudan, Larry, 1977, Progress and Its Problems, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
8. Longino, Helen E., 1990, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in
Scientific Inquiry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9. McGuire, J.E., 1992, “Scientific Change”, chapter 4 of Merrilee Salmon et al.,
Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 132–
178.
10. Merton, Robert King, 1973, The Sociology of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
11. Mirowski, Philip, 1996, “The Economic Consequences of Philip Kitcher”, Social
Epistemology, 10(2): 153–169. doi:10.1080/02691729608578812
12. Mitchell, Sandra D., 2003, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism, New York:
Cambridge University Press.
13. Nersessian, Nancy J., 1995, “Opening the Black Box: Cognitive Science and History of
Science”, Osiris, 10(1): 194–2011. doi:10.1086/368749
14. Newell, Allen & Herbert A. Simon, 1972, Human Problem Solving, Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
15. Newton-Smith, W., 1981, The Rationality of Science, London: Routledge.
16. Nickles, Thomas, 2009, “The Strange Story of Scientific Method”, in Joke Meheus &
Thomas Nickles (eds.), Models of Discovery and Creativity (Origins: Studies in the
Sources of Scientific Creativity 3), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 167–207.