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Towards a Methodology for Integrated History and Philosophy of Science

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The Philosophy of Historical Case Studies

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 319))

Abstract

We respond to two kinds of skepticism about integrated history and philosophy of science: foundational and methodological. Foundational skeptics doubt that the history and the philosophy of science have much to gain from each other in principle. We therefore discuss some of the unique rewards of work at the intersection of the two disciplines. By contrast, methodological skeptics already believe that the two disciplines should be related to each other, but they doubt that this can be done successfully. Their worries are captured by the so-called dilemma of case studies: On one horn of the dilemma, we begin our integrative enterprise with philosophy and proceed from there to history, in which case we may well be selecting our historical cases so as to fit our preconceived philosophical theses. On the other horn, we begin with history and proceed to philosophical reflection, in which case we are prone to unwarranted generalization from particulars. Against worries about selection bias, we argue that we routinely need to make explicit the criteria for choosing particular historical cases to investigate particular philosophical theses. It then becomes possible to ask whether or not the selection criteria were biased. Against worries about unwarranted generalization, we stress the iterative nature of the process by which historical data and philosophical concepts are brought into alignment. The skeptics’ doubts are fueled by an outdated model of outright confirmation versus outright falsification of philosophical concepts. A more appropriate model is one of stepwise and piecemeal improvement.

A glaring asymmetry, obvious at this meeting, is that historians dress better than philosophers – historians always being interested in the details, sartorial and otherwise, while philosophers seem concerned only with dressing in general.

Richards (1992)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Schickore (2011) gives a good overview of the debates about integrated history and philosophy of science since the middle of the 20th century, and she cites many key works. Howard (2011) offers a more long-term history of the relation of the two fields and discusses some of the fundamental reasons for their separation in the 20th century. A good snapshot of the state of the field in the new millennium can be found in Arabatzis and Schickore (2012).

  2. 2.

    While we focus on one flavor of HPS, we see others as complementary and equally valuable. For instance, a key project is to trace the origin and growth of modern concepts, theories and questions (Lennox 2001; Schickore 2011).

  3. 3.

    An indication of this is the tradition of “historical epistemology” (see e.g. Rheinberger 1997; Daston and Galison 2007; and the special issue of Erkenntnis edited by Feest and Sturm 2011).

  4. 4.

    We prefer not to draw a strong distinction between historical and contemporary scientific practice as an object of study. What would have been “contemporary” science to Giere in 1985 is “historical” now, but the theoretical questions we ask about our cases remain largely the same. The only difference are in the methods of study: How recent an episode is will partly dictate whether our tools will include archival studies, oral histories, laboratory notebooks, or questionnaires, not to mention “embedding” oneself in a research group. Depending on method, of course, some questions will be easier to answer than others.

  5. 5.

    Pinnick and Gale (2000) commented that “despite the possibility of doing so, philosophers have not pursued a method of case-study design” (p. 116). They also observed that disciplinary consensus about method coincides with progress.

  6. 6.

    While we adopt Chang’s general framework, we do not think that much hinges on whether we speak of “episodes” or “cases”, and we will continue to use both terms.

  7. 7.

    Schickore (2011) has argued that the history-philosophy relationship should not be understood in terms of a confrontational model, in analogy to the empirical sciences, but in terms of hermeneutics, or “the art of gradually reconciling provisional analytic concepts with a provisional reading of the historical record” (p. 459). However, we believe that the confrontational and the hermeneutic models can be reconciled. Certainly the confrontational model must be conceived, as we discuss, in cyclical and iterative terms. But this is no surprise, since the empirical sciences—on which the confrontational model is based—are similarly iterative in theory testing. Moreover, HPS is in part concerned with the beliefs and desires of human actors, the traditional domain of interpretive, hermeneutic approaches. But this has ample room in the confrontational model, which understands the study of human beliefs and motives in terms of empirical theses about cognitive states (how ever difficult these may be to ascertain).

  8. 8.

    See Scerri (2012) for a critique of Weisberg’s interpretation of Mendeleev’s work.

  9. 9.

    For the time being we refrained from assigning Mendeleev to any of the other subcategories, although Scerri (2012) suggested “classification”—which we should presumably count among theoretical practices.

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Acknowledgments

For helpful comments and debates, which have shaped this contribution significantly, we thank first and foremost the participants of the workshop “The philosophy of historical case studies” at the University of Bern (November 21–22, 2013). In addition, we are indebted to Michael Bycroft, Allan Franklin and Jutta Schickore; the participants of the Fifth Conference on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS5) at the University of Vienna (June 26–28, 2014); the Visiting and Postdoctoral Fellows at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science (2014–2015); and the members of the Lake Geneva Biology Interest Group (lgBIG). Raphael Scholl was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number P300P1_154590).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Raphael Scholl

  2. FB Philosophie, University of Konstanz, 78457, Konstanz, Germany

    Tim Räz

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  1. Raphael Scholl
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Correspondence to Raphael Scholl .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Institute of Mathematics, Mainz, Germany

    Tilman Sauer

  2. Department of History and Phil of Scienc, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Raphael Scholl

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Scholl, R., Räz, T. (2016). Towards a Methodology for Integrated History and Philosophy of Science. In: Sauer, T., Scholl, R. (eds) The Philosophy of Historical Case Studies. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 319. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30229-4_5

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