Science As It Could Have Been : Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (473 pages)
Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. The Contingentist/Inevitabilist Debate: Current State of Play, Paradigmatic Forms of Problems and Arguments, Connections to More Familiar Philosophical Themes - Léna Soler -- Part I. Global Survey of the Problem Situation -- 1. Why Contingentists Should Not Care about the Inevitabilist Demand to "Put-Up-or-Shut-Up": A Dialogic Reconstruction of the Argumentative Network - Léna Soler -- 2. Some Remarks about the Definitions of Contingentism and Inevitabilism - Catherine Allamel-Raffin and Jean-Luc Gangloff -- Part II. Contingency, Ontology and Realism -- 3. Science, Contingency, and Ontology - Andrew Pickering -- 4. Scientific Realism and the Contingency of the History of Science - Emiliano Trizio -- 5. Contingency and Inevitability in Science: Instruments, Interfaces, and the Independent World - Mieke Boon -- Part III. In Search of a Concrete and Empirically Tractable Way of Framing the Contingentist/Inevitabilist Issue -- 6. Contingency and "The Art of the Soluble" - Harry Collins -- 7. Contingency, Conditional Realism, and the Evolution of the Sciences - Ronald N. Giere -- 8. Necessity and Contingency in the Discovery of Electron Diffraction - Yves Gingras -- Part IV. Contingency and Mathematics -- 9. Contingency in Mathematics: Two Case Studies - Jean Paul Van Bendegem -- 10. Freedom of Framework - Jean-Michel Salanskis -- 11. On the Contingency of What Counts as "Mathematics" - Ian Hacking -- Part V. Widening the Scope of Contingentist/Inevitabilist Targets: Scientific Practices and the Methodological, Material, Tacit, and Social Dimensions of Science -- 12. The Science of Mind as It Could Have Been: About the Contingency of the (Quasi-) Disappearance of Introspection in Psychology - Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin. 13. Laws, Scientific Practice, and the Contingency/Inevitability Question - Joseph Rouse -- Part VI. Contingency and Scientific Pluralism -- 14. On the Plurality of (Theoretical) Worlds - Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond -- 15. Cultivating Contingency: A Case for Scientific Pluralism - Hasok Chang -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.
Science as It Could Have Been focuses on the crucial issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplines--physics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychology--to explore whether components of human science are inevitable, or if we could have developed an alternative successful science based on essentially different notions, conceptions, and results.