Introduction: systematicity, the nature of science?

Synthese, Feb 2018

Karim Bschir, Simon Lohse, Hasok Chang

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Introduction: systematicity, the nature of science?

Introduction: systematicity, the nature of science? Karim Bschir 0 1 2 Simon Lohse 0 1 2 Hasok Chang 0 1 2 B Karim Bschir 0 1 2 0 Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge , Cambridge , UK 1 CELLS-Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and Centre for Ethics and Philosophy of Science (Institute of Philosophy), Leibniz Universität Hannover , Hannover , Germany 2 Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich , Zurich , Switzerland This special issue provides a forum for the discussion of Paul Hoyningen-Huene's book Systematicity: The Nature of Science (2013) and the approach it introduces. Hoyningen-Huene's book marks the first attempt in many years to provide a comprehensive philosophical account of science at the highest possible level of generality and abstraction. It raises one central question: what is the nature of science? Before turning to Hoyningen-Huene's own answer and the contributions in this collection, let us put the question into context. Many scholars working in the philosophy of science are inclined to declare the question about the nature of science as futile. The question makes a problematic presumption, they argue, namely that there must be something that all practices subsumed under the term “science” have in common. But a close look at modern science just reveals an overwhelming diversity of experimental and computational methods, theoretical approaches, and epistemic standards that are applied in a huge variety of disciplinary traditions-especially if we follow Hoyingen-Huene and take the broad meaning of “science”, as in the German term Wissenschaft. It would seem that fields - like Eastern European history and antibiotic resistance research, for instance, have very little in common; any features that they happen to share, like the fact that they are both established and conducted in academic institutions, appear to be of little philosophical interest, let alone revealing anything essential or significant about science in general. After all, investigating the “essence” or “nature” of anything has been shown to be an ineffective enterprise in a great number of cases. From this perspective, trying to answer the question “What is the nature of science?” appears to be a fruitless, or even misguided, philosophical project. As a matter of fact, philosophers of science have rarely tackled this question in recent decades.1 Instead, there has been an emphasis on the disunity of science (see for instance Dupré 1993; Galison and Stump 1996; Cartwright 1999) . And almost like the sciences themselves, philosophy of science has witnessed a strong tendency towards ever-greater specialization. The philosophies of the special sciences have diversified to the extent that it has become difficult to recognize many points of contact between them. Despite the good reasons that exist for philosophers of science to focus their research on specific scientific disciplines or to tackle highly specialized ontological, epistemological and methodological problems, we, the guest editors of this special issue, are driven by the belief that raising the question about the nature of science in the most general sense is still relevant and philosophically legitimate. There are four main reasons for thinking that there should be room for a general philosophy of science and its central question about the nature of science: (1) The question is relevant for philosophy in a broad sense, as one of the main goals of modern philosophy has been to act as an intermediary between what Sellars (1962) called the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the world. How should we reconcile recent findings in neuroscience with our common sense concept of free will and rational action? Is it possible to integrate the concepts of modern physics with our everyday understanding of notions like space, time, and causality? To what extent is our everyday understanding of personal success compatible with insights of empirical educational research stressing latent environmental determinants of success? How should we modify our folk psychology in light of recent findings in astrology and voodoo healing? If you were slightly confused after reading the third question, perhaps you are not entirely sure whether educational research really contributes to the “scientific image” of the world. If you flinched after reading the fourth question, you probably share the common conviction that astrology and voodoo metaphysics are not part of the scientific image of the world. But what is it that makes neuroscience and physics a legitimate contributor to the scientific image, but perhaps not educational research, and certainly not astrology and voodoo healing? In other words, what is it that distinguishes science from other forms of epistemic engagement with reality? In many areas of philosophy answers to these kinds of questions seem to be presuppos (...truncated)


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Karim Bschir, Simon Lohse, Hasok Chang. Introduction: systematicity, the nature of science?, Synthese, 2018, pp. 1-13, DOI: 10.1007/s11229-018-1685-z