Towards a Positive Epistemology

Abstract

At present, philosophers of science are taking very little interest in the human sciences. Of course this indifference is understandable. The achievements and applications of the natural sciences are incomparably more spectacular than the conquests of the human sciences. The former give the impression of a continuous development, although historians of science show us that the growth or decline of certain branches of even the most rigorous of these disciplines — mathematics — is bound up with events of an anecdotal nature and is determined by the structure of the occupational context. Despite this, it is difficult not to gain the impression that the history of the natural sciences is guided as if by internal necessity.

Paper delivered in 1968 to the Société de philosophie at Bordeaux and published in the Revue philosophique, Vol. 94, No. 3–4, 1969, pp. 303–18 with the title “Pour une philosophie des sciences sociales”.