Prolepsis

Abstract

Anticipation, presumption, and promise are what the term prolepsis conjures up. There is, however, no anticipation without retrospection, no presumption without prior consumption, and no promise without stake. And just as there is generally more than one way of looking at what happened in the past, proleptic excursions also contain an element of choice. Several grand perspectives for the historiography of science have followed each other in the past decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was fashionable to talk about revolutions. In the 1980s, revolutions were passé and ‘turns’ became the order of the day — thus we could have taken the so-called ‘practical turn’ as our point of departure. We would then have asked how far and where that turn has taken us since and what we might expect from it in the near future. In the 1990s it was fashionable to take issue with that ‘relativistic turn’ in philosophy and history of science which in the second half of the decade provoked a battle for truth, objectivity, and reason. This was a battle fiercely fought by those who saw the grand scientific project of the Occident endangered, against those accused of abandoning these values altogether. We could have asked whether the ensuing ‘science wars’ did or did not bring about a climatic change in talking about science that will prove lasting and whether, as a consequence, the claims and terms of inter- and transdisciplinarity will be redefined. And indeed, we will come back to all these issues of the 1980s and the 1990s, but we will tackle them from a different perspective.