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History and Philosophy of Science in a New Key By Michael Friedman*

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science from Thomas Kuhn to the present. This relationship, of course, has often been troubled, but there is now new hope for an ongoing productive interaction— due to an increasing awareness, among other things, of the mutual entanglement between the development of modern science and the development of modern philosophy on the part of both professional (historically minded) philosophers and professional historians of science. This idea is illustrated with several examples, including the entanglement of Einstein’s theory of relativity with logical empiricism and its precursors and the entanglement of the analytic tradition in philosophy first with mathematical logic and then (through mathematical logic) with the cognitive sciences. Against this background, finally, the essay considers the emergence of contemporary social and cultural history of science from the Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophical traditions.

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HE “PROBLEM” OF THE RELATIONSHIP between history of science and philosophy of science, as it arises for us at the turn of the twenty-first century, takes its starting point from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. At the time, Kuhn’s work had a prominent place within a wider ferment in the philosophy of science that occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s and included such figures as Norwood Russell Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and others—all of whom, in one way or another, took a historical approach to the philosophy of science especially seriously. Kuhn’s work was particularly important, however, insofar as it was undertaken by someone who was now a professional historian, and, at the same time, it led to a profound challenge to professional philosophy of science that provoked serious conster-

* Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. I am indebted to Bernard Lightman for organizing this Focus section, as well as for very helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay. I am also grateful to my co-contributors, not only for their thought-provoking essays, but also for allowing me, on this occasion, to have the last word. Some of the central ideas for this essay incubated at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during the academic year 2006/2007, and I am particularly indebted to two of my colleagues there: the sociologist and historian of science Andrew Pickering and the cultural historian Paula Fass. Isis, 2008, 99:125–134 ©2008 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2008/9901-0007$10.00 125

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nation in the philosophical community.1 Kuhn’s work, in the context of precisely this wider ferment, was also closely associated with the institution of new programs and departments of history and philosophy of science in North America (following the earlier example of the department in Cambridge founded by the philosopher Gerd Buchdahl)— including the Departments of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana, Pittsburgh, and Toronto and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science (involving both departments) instituted at Princeton with Kuhn himself. Kuhn was primarily an intellectual historian, and he saw his own work as deeply philosophical. (It is no wonder that, after he left Princeton, he migrated to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.) In this respect, he worked within an older tradition of philosophical history of science, associated with such figures as Ernst Cassirer, Emile Meyerson, Le´on Brunschvicg, He´le`ne Metzger, Edwin Burtt, Anneliese Maier, E. J. Dijksterhuis, and Alexandre Koyre´—and Koyre´, as Kuhn tells us, exerted an especially important influence on Structure.2 Yet Kuhn’s work was also instrumental in the development of a serious estrangement between the two disciplines in the period following the publication and assimilation of Structure. On the one hand, Kuhn’s apparent rejection of the traditional ideal of scientific rationality and objectivity dismayed professional philosophers, especially when this rejection was eagerly embraced by much more radical thinkers, associated with the sociology of scientific knowledge, as a new kind of philosophical relativism to be gleefully waved in the face of the philosophical establishment.3 On the other hand, Kuhn’s emphasis on the scientific community reinforced an emerging trend toward social and cultural history of science, echoing a wider trend in the discipline of history more generally. Institutional support for history and philosophy of science in the traditional (primarily intellectual) sense began to fade, resulting in the reabsorption of some programs (such as the one at Princeton) into history departments and the founding of new programs in science studies, studies in science, technology, and society, and so on.4 More recently, however, substantial hope for history and philosophy of science as a discipline has emerged once again. Many professional philosophers are no longer dismayed by a historicized conception of science—nor, for that matter, by a historicized conception of their own field. Very serious interest in the history of modern philosophy has re-emerged within the Anglophone tradition, and this includes, inevitably, serious interest in the relationship between the history of modern philosophy and the history of modern science.5 Moreover, as Alan Richardson points out, this increasing interest in 1 Israel Scheffler’s Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967) was a paradigmatic representative of this phenomenon. 2 Kuhn acknowledges all of these figures (especially Koyre´) as significant influences. See Michael Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism,” in Thomas Kuhn, ed. Thomas Nickles (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 19 – 44, for further discussion of Kuhn’s relationship to this historiographical tradition. 3 For my own take on this phenomenon see Michael Friedman, “On the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Its Philosophical Agenda,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1998, 29:239 –271. 4 The growing interest in experimental practice within both history and philosophy of science further reinforced this tendency, insofar as experiment is inextricably entangled with technology and thus, in turn, with society. 5 See, e.g., Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992); Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Douglas Jesseph, Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mathematics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1993); Lynn Joy, Gassendi the Atomist (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987); Paolo Mancosu, Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); Catherine Wilson, Leibniz’s Metaphysics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989); C. Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); and Margaret Wilson, Ideas and Mechanisms: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). Gerd Buchdahl’s Meta-

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history then led to a new interest in the history of analytic philosophy itself—and also to a new variant of an HPS-style discipline: the history of the philosophy of science (HOPOS). Indeed, much of Alan’s work, as well as my own, has been squarely located within this new discipline (see notes 5, 17, and 18 of Alan’s essay)—which is undoubtedly why we two were invited to contribute to this Focus section. That our two co-contributors, Raine Daston and Peter Galison, also find substantial room within their broadly cultural history for an engagement with philosophy and its history provides further ground for hope that a new kind of productive relationship between the two fields may now be possible.6 I very much agree with Alan, in particular, that the methods of cultural history may fruitfully be applied to the history of twentieth-century philosophy of science—and especially to the history of logical empiricism.7 Thus, logical empiricism conceived of itself as a revolutionary kind of scientific philosophy (not as a contribution to traditional foundationalist epistemology), belonging to a wider cultural movement aimed (among other things) at glorifying and promulgating the scientific ethos much more generally. But why should this particular piece of cultural history be of interest to historians of science? Alan suggests, if I understand him correctly, that this is because logical empiricism (and analytic philosophy more generally) is an interesting example of marginal science— of a discipline that assumes the rhetorical trappings of a genuine science while still lacking “the ability persuasively to claim the sorts of results that science can claim.” I would like to add, however, that the history of logical empiricism should also be of interest to historians of science for a perhaps more significant reason: namely, the history of logical empiricism (and of analytic philosophy more generally) is itself inextricably entangled with the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science. Analytic philosophy is inconceivable without the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury development of modern mathematics and mathematical logic. Indeed, it was precisely because modern mathematical logic was absolutely central to its self-identity and mission— under Bertrand Russell’s slogan “Logic as the essence of philosophy”— that analytic philosophy in general and logical empiricism in particular thought that philosophy had now, at last, achieved scientific status. It was precisely modern mathematical logic, that is, that now provided philosophy as a discipline with properly scientific technical tools for achieving the kind of cooperative research community that Carnap physics and the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), which treats the history of modern philosophy in relation to modern science from a Kantian point of view, began this recent trend—and, accordingly, it substantially influenced much subsequent work, including my own Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992). 6 Aside from the work of Raine and Peter, I might also mention, as further examples of this genre, Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Equivalence and Priority: Newton versus Leibniz (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Meli, Thinking with Objects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006); Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988); Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1995); Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanism in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982); Joan L. Richards, Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England (Boston: Academic, 1988); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985); William Newman and Lawrence Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002); and Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006). This style of history of science, in my view, provides an instructive complement to the historical work by professional philosophers cited in note 5, above. 7 As Alan points out (see note 16 of his essay), Peter Galison has provided important contributions to this history in his work on the place of Rudolf Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt (and the concept of “Aufbau” more generally) in the wider context of Weimar modernism.

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celebrates in the preface to the Aufbau.8 Moreover, for logical empiricism, in particular, the second philosophically fundamental achievement of early twentieth-century science was the creation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. For not only had this theory exploited modern abstract mathematics to the fullest in a new non-Euclidean theory of gravitation; it had also responded to specifically philosophical motivations embedded in the tradition of scientific empiricism with which the Vienna Circle itself most closely identified: the tradition, as they conceived it, of Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, and Henri Poincare´. Thus, for the logical empiricists, the general theory of relativity was philosophically fundamental because it showed conclusively that the original Kantian conception of the necessary—Euclidean—structure of our spatial intuition could no longer be sustained. Yet this process had in fact begun much earlier, in a generalization and transformation of the Kantian conception by Helmholtz. Helmholtz understood the problem of spatial representation within the context of his own work in spatial perception and sensory psychophysiology, but, at the same time, he maintained that Kant’s conception of space as a necessary form of our external intuition (rather than a given perceptual datum) is basically correct. Kant was wrong, however, that this spatial form is necessarily Euclidean— only a more general spatial geometry (given by the condition of “free mobility” valid in all spaces of constant curvature) is in fact a necessary condition for both spatial measurement and the perceptual representation of space. Poincare´, in turn, generalized and extended Helmholtz’s conception, by arguing that the specific geometry (of constant curvature) we then arrive at is determined by neither reason nor experience but, rather, as Poincare´ put it, by “a convention or definition in disguise.”9 And, finally, by situating himself within this transformation of the original Kantian conception by Helmholtz and Poincare´, and in the light of Mach’s discussion of the relativity of motion in the context of Newtonian mechanics, Einstein was able to put all of these earlier elements together in a completely surprising and unexpected way in the first actual application of a non-Euclidean geometry to physics in the general theory of relativity.10 But why is this important? And why, in particular, should historians of science be interested? One reason is that Kuhn uses the example of the development of Einstein’s theory of relativity as a central illustration of his view that revolutionary new paradigms can be incommensurable or nonintertranslatable with the old. Moreover, Kuhn makes precisely this argument, in the context of the transition from Newton to Einstein, in explicit opposition to what he calls “early logical 8 See note 6 of Alan’s essay, together with the passage to which it is appended; and, of course, Alan has himself emphasized the seminal importance of modern mathematical logic here as much as anyone. Modern logic was centrally involved with the development of modern mathematics, insofar as it first emerged, in the work of Gottlob Frege, in the context of the “rigorization of analysis” by Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Richard Dedekind, and Karl Weierstrass—which, in turn, was intimately connected with the development of set theory by Georg Cantor. These developments finally led to the so-called foundations crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, involving David Hilbert and L. E. J. Brouwer, which, in turn, led to Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language in 1934 —and thus to the fundamental framework (the “principle of tolerance”) for all of his later philosophy. For discussion of these developments (and further references) see the essays collected in Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Carnap (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007). 9 This conception is developed especially in Henri Poincare ´ , La science et l’hypothe`se (Paris: Flammarion, 1902). 10 I have told this story several times in print—in greatest detail in Michael Friedman, “Geometry as a Branch of Physics: Background and Context for Einstein’s ‘Geometry and Experience,’” in Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics to Honor Howard Stein on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. David Malament (Chicago: Open Court, 2002). See also Friedman, Dynamics of Reason (Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publications, 2001); and Friedman, “Space, Time, and Geometry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Einstein, ed. Michel Janssen and Christoph Lehner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming).

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empiricism.” This is especially ironic, as has been pointed out more than once, since the logical empiricists were in fact in substantial agreement with Kuhn about the profound revolutionary significance of Einstein’s new theory—and, therefore, it appears that Kuhn first made this argument in a state of blissful ignorance of their actual views.11 I myself have argued, in addition, that when we take the associated developments in scientific philosophy fully into account, we thereby find a natural and continuous transformation of concepts capable of bridging the Kuhnian conceptual discontinuity between Newtonian and relativistic physics.12 From this point of view, therefore, the main problem with Kuhn’s history is that he does not adequately discuss the concurrent developments in scientific philosophy, which, as a matter of fact, were nonetheless inextricably entangled with it. Of course one need not buy into my particular “answer to Kuhn” to appreciate this situation—and one need not even be interested in the Kuhnian problem of incommensurability at all. For it is simply a historical fact—and a particularly stubborn one—that modern science and philosophy first came into being as an inseparable unity (conceived, at the time, as a revolutionary new type of “natural philosophy” aiming definitively to replace Aristotelian-Scholastic natural philosophy), and they have continued to be inextricably entangled with one another ever since. To be sure, they can be and have been pursued independently of each other, as what we might call quasi-autonomous parts of a larger cultural whole. Nevertheless, there is simply no way fully to understand the historical development of one without the other—and this situation has continued, moreover, throughout the twentieth century. For example, the development of analytic philosophy itself played a very significant role in the rise of linguistics, computer science, and (more generally) the cognitive sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. For these fields explicitly built on the purely mathematical achievements of modern logic (Chomskian linguistics on the recursion theory developed by Kurt Go¨del and others, computer science on Alan Turing’s solution to Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem); and it

11 This argument occurs in the pivotal Chapter 9 of Structure, entitled “The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions.” The historical irony was first pointed out in George Reisch, “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science, 1991, 58:264 –277, and then further discussed in John Earman, “Carnap, Kuhn, and the Philosophy of Scientific Methodology,” in World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. Paul Horwich (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 9 –36; see also Kuhn’s response to Earman’s essay (and to my essay in the same volume) in his “Afterwords,” ibid., pp. 311–341. It turns out, in particular, that Carnap served as Kuhn’s editor on behalf of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (in which Structure first appeared), and, in this capacity, Carnap wrote to Kuhn very warmly expressing his fundamental agreement with the idea that radically new “conceptual frameworks” (and not merely new facts) arise in cases of scientific revolutions. 12 This argument is made at greatest length in Friedman, Dynamics of Reason (cit. n. 10). The basic idea is that, while Kuhn is indeed correct that the two theories are incommensurable, insofar as Einstein’s general theory of relativity represents a genuine expansion of our space of conceptual possibilities (which, in particular, could by no means be comprehended from the point of view of Newton’s theory of universal gravitation), there is still a natural and continuous route from one space of conceptual possibilities to the other, mediated by precisely the development from Kant, through Helmholtz, Mach, and Poincare´, and finally to Einstein briefly sketched above. At the level of philosophical reflection on the relevant science, for example, a lively debate on the relativity of space, time, and motion in Newtonian physics continued throughout the nineteenth century (as, e.g., in Mach). Moreover, a parallel debate on the meaning and empirical application of the new non-Euclidean geometries also took place during this same period (carried out, especially, by Helmholtz and Poincare´). Einstein was then able to join these two hitherto independent metascientific preoccupations together in a completely unexpected and unpredictable fashion, as the culmination of his earlier work on the principle of equivalence in 1907–1912, and it was in precisely this way that he thereby created the radically new conceptual possibility of representing the gravitational field by a non-Euclidean geometry. (N.B.: This way of defending the “rationality” of the transition in question entirely blurs the famous distinction between “context of justification” and “context of discovery.”)

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was precisely the analytic tradition initiated by Frege and Russell that took mathematical logic as a new kind of representation of human thought and language, thereby paving the way for its application to a new kind of empirical “science of the mind.”13 Fortunately, as I have already suggested, there is increasing awareness of the mutual entanglement of modern science and philosophy within both professional history of philosophy and professional history of science (compare again notes 5 and 6, above). And, as I have also suggested, the work of Raine Daston and Peter Galison has been especially influential in this regard—which is undoubtedly why they were invited to contribute to this Focus section. As a historian of the philosophy of science, I take this as a very substantial reason for optimism; and I eagerly look forward, in particular, to digesting their monumental new book on objectivity—which overlaps significantly with my own preoccupations concerning the philosophical and scientific evolution from Kant, through such central nineteenth-century figures as Helmholtz, to the early twentieth century.14 Raine’s essay takes up and develops themes from her earlier work— especially on the inculcation of exacting practices of scientific observation. Her aim, as she puts it, “is to argue in favor of a philosophical and historical inquiry into the ontology of scientific observation: how expert observation discerns and stabilizes scientific objects for a community of researchers.” In particular, she endorses Ludwik Fleck’s conception of the “genesis and development” of scientific facts, insofar as habitual training in scientific practices of observation enables practitioners to forge “stable kinds out of confused sensations,” thereby “generating order out of chaos.”15 The crucial point, for Raine, is that such cultivated perception takes time and practice; and, on this basis, she opposes what she calls the “Kantian or neo-Kantian” conception (which, she suggests, has dominated much of recent history and philosophy of science), according to which we perceive the world through “lenses” or “filters” preselected by thought. Paradigmatic of the view she opposes is the notion of “gestalt-switch” employed by Hanson and Kuhn, for the idea of a sudden “shift of perspective” misses precisely the fundamental importance of temporally extended processes of habituation. Raine suggests that, in this respect, Fleck was “perhaps pre-Kantian, almost Aristotelian,” insofar as Aristotle, too, had rightly stressed the importance of memory and habit in this connection. I believe that Raine is entirely correct to emphasize the fundamental importance of training and habituation in the cultivation of scientific observation—and to connect this point, in particular, with the importance of the scientific community. I would not be a faithful student of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy, however, if I did not lodge a

13 Compare note 8, above. There is considerable irony in this situation, since Frege’s and Russell’s original philosophy was characterized by a militant brand of antinaturalism and antipsychologism, whereas the rise of the cognitive sciences now figures centrally in a revival of both naturalism and psychologism within the philosophical community. The history of the twentieth-century revolution in the cognitive sciences, and its entanglement with the history of both mathematical logic and analytic philosophy, has yet to be written. 14 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007). I am grateful to Raine and Peter for sending me a pre-publication draft, and I am especially grateful to Raine for a number of stimulating conversations about their ongoing project over the past several years. 15 Raine is careful not to say that habitual perception creates its objects: “Without these acquired habits of perception cultivated by observation, there would not only be no science; there would be no articulated visible (or auditory or tactile) world at all. This is the way perception furnishes the universe. It doesn’t create the universe, but it does shape and sort, outlining sharp edges and arranging parts into wholes.” This is admittedly a tricky issue, but it seems clear that, for Raine, cultivated scientific perception in some sense “generates” the kinds into which objects are sorted. Peter puts the question this way when discussing “historical ontology” in his essay: “Under which circumstances and in what conceptual form do collecting and observing together bring new kinds of objects or classes of objects into existence?”

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protest against what looks to me like a polemical rather than genuinely historical use of the history of philosophy in support of this point. (Since Raine is of course well aware that both Alan and myself are avid students of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy, I conjecture that she intends her remarks to be provocative—and, if so, she has succeeded admirably!) In the first place, no significant Kantian or neo-Kantian text with which I am familiar uses the language of “lenses” or “filters” (which belongs rather to popular stereotypical characterizations rather than the original texts). The preferred Kantian terminology for what perception does to its objects is “constitution,” which has precisely the connotation of turning raw perceptions into sophisticated scientific experience that Raine finds in Fleck.16 Moreover, it is misleading, in the second place, to associate Fleck with Aristotle rather than the Kantian tradition on this point. For although Aristotle indeed suggestively connects perceptual experience with memory and habit, what he has in mind is a purely inductive procedure by which we simply come to see what universals are actually instantiated in a number of given sensory particulars through repeated perceptions. There is no suggestion at all that we thereby constitute or generate the universal kind in question, and, in this sense, Aristotle’s conception of sensory perception remains fundamentally passive (and therefore, from a modern point of view, naively realistic).17 Thus, although both Aristotle and Hume have much more to say about the topic of habituation than does Kant, habitual perception, for both earlier philosophers, remains a largely inductive—and largely passive—affair; it was Kant, and Kant alone, who first stressed the active role of the mind in constituting the object of perception as such. But Kant did not, as I have suggested, emphasize the importance of habituation—

16 In §30 of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant famously puts the point this way: “They [the categories of the understanding] serve only, as it were, to spell out appearances, in order to be able to read them as experience.” The language of “constitution”—and sometimes “generation”—for this relationship is used throughout the Kantian and neo-Kantian literature. For example, the Marburg School of scientific neoKantianism characterized the relationship between thought and its objects as precisely one of “generation [Erzeugung],” and, as both Alan and I have emphasized, Carnap self-consciously picks up on this language, and on the language of “constitution,” in the Aufbau (see again the works cited in note 5 of Alan’s essay). Indeed, the original title of the Aufbau was “Outline of a Constitutional Theory of the Objects of Experience,” and a preliminary sketch of the Aufbau project was entitled “From Chaos to Reality.” Compare Raine’s characterization of the difference between Fleck and neo-Kantianism: “Unlike the neo-Kantians, who worried about how the subjective mind could know the objective world, Fleck was concerned with how perception forged stable kinds out of confused sensations. For the neo-Kantians, the problem was the gulf between the subjective and the objective; for Fleck, it was generating order out of chaos.” Yet the main problem for both Kant and the neo-Kantians was precisely “how perception forged stable kinds out of confused sensations”; and Kant’s rejection of the possibility of any (theoretical) knowledge at all of the “thing-in-itself” (as also stressed in §30 of the Prolegomena) was intended precisely to transform the traditional problem (as raised by Descartes, e.g.) of “how the subjective mind could know the objective world” into the problem of turning mere sensations or raw perceptions into scientific experience. 17 The context of the quotation from the Posterior Analytics Raine cites (see note 10 of her essay) is the need for induction to supplement deduction by supplying us with primitive premises. Two paragraphs later Aristotle explains the point this way: “What we have just said but not said clearly, let us say again: when one of the undifferentiated things makes a stand [through memory], there is a primitive universal in the mind (for though one perceives the particular, perception is of the universal— e.g., of man but not of Callias the man); again a stand is made in these, until what has no parts and is universal stands— e.g., such and such an animal stands, until animal does, and in this a stand is made in the same way. Thus it is clear that it is necessary for us to become familiar with the primitives by induction; for perception too instills the universal in this way.” Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), Vol. 1, p. 166. More generally, perception, for Aristotle, takes place when the same form or universal kind that objectively exists in some natural object comes also to inform the perceptive soul (and it only then becomes cognitively significant—for the appropriate kind of animal, i.e., humans—when memory and repetition allow the universal itself to be grasped by the intellectual soul); hence Aristotle’s “naive realism,” from a modern point of view, consists in precisely this commitment to objectively pre-existent universal kinds.

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largely because he took the fundamental categories of the understanding that perform the constitution in question to be fixed a priori. And it was Helmholtz, more than anyone else in the neo-Kantian tradition, who then introduced habituation into the Kantian picture. In particular, Helmholtz, as I have said, generalized Kant’s conception of space as a necessary form of our external intuition to include all spaces of constant curvature; in addition, he generalized Kant’s conception of the understanding so that the principle of causality, in particular, becomes the purely regulative demand that we always seek for lawlike regularities among our perceptions. The basic idea of Helmholtz’s celebrated “sign theory” of perception is then that we come to perceive both space and the objects surrounding us in space by an inductive process of habituation, as we gradually build up the required lawlike regularities among our sensations: “[Sensations] are signs, which we have learned to read; they are a language, given to us along with our organization, in which external objects speak to us. But we must learn to understand this language through practice and experience, just as much as our native language.”18 In this respect, however, Helmholtz represents an intermediate stage between Kant and Fleck, for he does not emphasize the necessarily social character of such habitual “practice and experience” as mediated by exacting cultural practices aimed at instilling and stabilizing the acquired ability to perceive the relevant general kinds. And, more generally, while Kant himself first opened the philosophical door to a proper appreciation of the necessarily social character of knowledge (by understanding objectivity in terms of necessary intersubjective validity rather than correspondence to a mind-independent external reality), it was only within post-Kantian German idealism—and, in particular, with Hegel—that such an appreciation was first articulated and solidified. Through the work of Karl Marx—and later, of course, Michel Foucault—this kind of conception was then transformed, in turn, into the politically critical sociology of scientific knowledge familiar to us today; and Fleck’s very important conception of the “genesis and development” of scientific facts should, I suggest, be seen as one more stage in an ongoing process of successively transforming Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy rather than as starkly opposed to it. Indeed, it is only in this way, I suggest, that we can now properly understand the “genesis and development” of Fleck’s own conception; and it then becomes clear, in addition, both how Kuhn himself could take Fleck as an ally and (what is perhaps even more striking) how the recent tradition of placing science in its social and cultural context is also situated within the intellectual lineage ultimately deriving from Kant.19 18 The quotation is from Helmholtz’s lecture “The Aim and Progress of Physical Science” (1869): see Hermann von Helmholtz, Vortra¨ge und Reden, Vol. 1 (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1903), p. 393; and R. Kahl, ed., Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1971), p. 242. This quotation clearly echoes Kant’s famous passage from §30 of the Prolegomena (see note 16, above), self-consciously adding the need for habituation and learning. More generally, Helmholtz’s account of inductive perceptual habituation (in contrast to Aristotle’s and Hume’s) is Kantian, insofar as it proceeds under the necessary guidance of a priori “forms” and “categories” contributed by the mind—and it cannot take place (as it does in both Aristotle and Hume) solely on the basis of purely “given” elements in the perceptual data themselves. For further discussion see Michael Friedman, “Helmholtz’s Zeichentheorie and Schlick’s Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre: Early Logical Empiricism and Its Nineteenth-Century Background,” Philosophical Topics, 1997, 25:19 –50. 19 Kuhn expresses his debt to Fleck (somewhat obliquely) in the preface to Structure. Moreover, Kuhn later emphasized the kinship between his conception and historicized versions of Kantianism, and what we are now in a position to see is that he is here following Fleck in introducing precisely a social—and thus historical— dimension into the Kantian picture. Given his own clear emphasis on the importance of the scientific community (and on the importance of training within such communities in particular), Kuhn’s talk of “gestalt-switches” should thus be seen as a potentially misleading metaphor rather than an indication of any fundamental philosophical error.

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These last remarks give me an occasion, finally, to respond to some of the questions raised in Peter Galison’s rich essay “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science”—and let me begin with Peter’s ninth problem, concerning “Relentless Historicism.” The reader will easily perceive, from what I have just said, that I am very much committed to the idea that philosophy, too, is and must be historically contextualized. In particular, I do not think that it is a fruitful approach to history and philosophy of science to view any philosophical conception as “a pre-established philosophical framework into which the history is inserted,” nor do I recommend that we put any philosopher—Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Foucault, or even Kant— on “a transhistorical pedestal and use his claims . . . as an unmoved prime mover, wisdom without origin.” Thus, for example, while I certainly identify myself as a kind of Kantian (or perhaps neo-Kantian; at this point it does not much matter which), my whole approach to Kant’s philosophy rests on embedding it within the context of its time—and, in particular, against the background of the fundamentally Newtonian science of nature that dominated the eighteenth century. Similarly, I approach the question of the contemporary relevance of the Kantian philosophy not by arguing, for example, that Euclidean geometry must still somehow characterize our form of external intuition (which would be futile), nor by contending that Kant’s original view is consistent with a non-Euclidean form of spatial intuition after all (which, I believe, would be historically incorrect), but, rather, by describing how the original Kantian position was successively transformed by a long tradition of scientific thinkers leading all the way up to the present day. This brings me to a second point, which also connects with some of the questions Peter raises in his seventh and eighth problems, concerning “Locality and Globality.” Here I want to suggest that the old-fashioned notion of tradition should, once again, be seen as central to historical inquiry. History should be seen, in particular, as the birth, unfolding, evolution, transformation, and (perhaps most important) mutual interaction and entanglement of a very large number of traditions constituting the extraordinarily complex and ever-changing fabric of human culture. Naturally, as a professional philosopher of science, the traditions in which I myself am primarily interested, and with which I am most familiar, are traditions of thought (both scientific and philosophical), but it is of paramount importance to realize that these traditions, too, are only a part of a much larger cultural whole comprehending religious, political, artistic, technological, instrumental, institutional, and many other traditions within a vast and very intricately interconnected web. Just as a particular philosophical or scientific idea has the meaning it does only as part of this larger whole, a given temporal slice or historical episode (as studied within contemporary microhistory, for example) has the meaning it does only in the context of a number of temporally extended traditions that intersect, as it were, at precisely this focal point.20

20 Thus, to take the example of Carlo Ginzburg’s celebrated microhistory of Menocchio the miller (discussed in Peter’s essay), I would suggest that it has the larger global significance it does only against the background of the wider context of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the history of feudalism and the rise of the artisan class, and so on: it focuses a number of diverse temporally extended histories at a single point of intersection. Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1987), provides an excellent illustration of this point for laboratory studies. The heart of the book (Ch. 4) is a very focused (micro)history of experiments on weak neutral currents from the fall of 1971 to the spring of 1972. But this local story is explicitly embedded within a much larger temporal context, extending from the end of the nineteenth century to the period in question. It thereby acquires a global significance when we see that and how a number of traditions in mid-twentieth-century physics intersect with one another in precisely the local episode under consideration— theoretical traditions (the development and triumph of quantum electrodynamics, its generalization and extension to other interactions in gauge field theory), traditions of instrumentation and experimentation (the shift from

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But how (to revert to Peter’s questions concerning “relentless historicism”) can we then take up a philosophical perspective of our own on the history we wish to investigate? It would seem that we must take up some such perspective (if only an explicitly antiphilosophical perspective) in order to make a coherent selection from the otherwise inchoate mass of historical details—and do we not thus need a transhistorical “unmoved mover” after all?21 I think not. Rather, we need to locate ourselves within a particular philosophical tradition by a selfconscious and historically well-informed choice. For example, I have chosen to locate myself within the Kantian tradition; others may very well choose differently. What one cannot do, however, is ignore the Kantian tradition entirely or downplay its central importance within the wider tradition of modern philosophy; and the same holds, mutatis mutandis, for all the other major traditions making up the extremely complex network of modern philosophical thought. Any such self-conscious choice furnishes us with an “ism”—“structuralism,” “psychologism,” “anti-psychologism,” “naturalism,” “transcendentalism,” and so on—from the point of view of which we can temporarily take our stand within the ongoing flux of history (but only, of course, for the moment).22 If we were to add the problem of “tradition” to Peter’s list, its hackneyed counterpart would be “innovation”— or, as I would prefer to put it, the surprising emergence of unpredictable novelty. I have suggested that one important way to understand such novelty is in terms of the unexpected intersection of a number of quasi-autonomous but mutually entangled cultural traditions; and I have also suggested, in particular, that this kind of phenomenon is especially important for the relationship between the history of science and (the history of) the philosophy of science. Who could have predicted, for example, that the nineteenth-century tradition of metascientific reflection on the relativity of motion and the parallel nineteenth-century tradition of reflection on the foundations of geometry would then intersect with one another in Einstein’s work on the principle of equivalence in the years 1907–1912, resulting in the radically new conceptual possibility that the gravitational field may be represented by a non-Euclidean geometry (compare notes 10 and 12, above)? Or who could have predicted, to take a rather different example, that Kant’s original conception of the constitution of the object of experience by means of the categories—through a number of interactions involving, among other things, psychophysiology, post-Kantian German idealism, and Marxian economics—would then result in Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact in 1935 and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 (compare notes 18 and 19, above)? And, in the end, is it not the emergence of precisely such episodes of unpredictable novelty that, for all of us (historians and historically minded philosophers alike), makes the study of history so exciting? cloud chamber detectors to bubble and spark chamber detectors attached to accelerators, the use of computerassisted data analysis and simulation), and the rise of “big science,” with its radically new institutional and social structures (leading to new forms of group interaction and dynamics). 21 It is an irritating fact, I’m afraid, that skeptical or antiphilosophical perspectives are also philosophical—as, e.g., in Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or the later Heidegger. An example from fairly recent history of science is Stillman Drake’s work on Galileo, which self-consciously adopted such a stance in opposition to Koyre´ (thereby obtaining several important results). It is clear, however, that Drake intended to downplay the importance of philosophy (especially Platonic and Cartesian philosophy) in order to emphasize the importance of the Archimedean tradition in pure and applied mathematics—which, in Drake’s judgment, was thus much more central to the “essence” of Galileo’s achievement. 22 Is it viciously circular, perhaps, to locate oneself in a particular philosophical and scientific tradition and then use this very perspective as a basis for selecting the philosophical and scientific episodes on which one chooses to focus? No; because none of this determines what the results of a given historical inquiry will turn out to be— by their fruits we shall know them.

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