Historical Realism and Contextual Objectivity: A Developing Perspective in the Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The twentieth century ought to have been a century of philosophical reform — goodness knows, enough people have tried to make it so. But philosophical revolutions appear painfully difficult to accomplish. In the case of philosophical reflection about scientific knowledge, perhaps, one ought not to complain, since the orthodoxy we need to overcome was itself established as orthodoxy only in mid-century. Still, the situation is puzzling. Although so far as I know the so-called ‘received view’ is by now received only in a few outlying places, and although every reprint or preprint I receive seems to announce a new almost orthodoxy from yet another angle — in spite of all that, a positive, non-apologizing acceptance of a new approach to the philosophy of science seems to be still outstanding. When I have tried on a number of occasions in the past few years to suggest what such a new approach might look like, I have been received with the announcement that I was presenting a position of pure relativism, or, worse yet, pragmatism.² That there is a quasi-relativistic component in the new philosophy of science I am willing to admit, though I would prefer to call it a perspectival component (I will return to that briefly later). But pragmatism! If that is the kind of abandonment of any interest in cognitive claims we are supposed to be advocating, we are presenting our case very badly — or rather I have been doing so, for of course I am speaking only from my own experience.

This paper was written as a lecture for the University of California, Davis, April, 1985. It is a very rough draft of what might — or ought — to be said on this topic.