Léna Soler, Emiliano Trizio, & Andrew Pickering (eds), Science as It Could Have Been: Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental data, ontological commitments, and so forth, have been significantly different? Science as It Could Have Been focuses on a crucial issue that contemporary science studies have often neglected: the issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplinesphysics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychologyto 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. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors in philosophy, sociology, and history of science, this edited volume offers a comprehensive analysis of the contingency/inevitability problem and a lively and up-to-date portrait of current debates in sciences studies.
CONTENTS
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
This is an absorbingly interesting symposium on the question of, in Ian Hacking's phrase, how inevitable the results of successful science are. The issues in play are as important as they are difficult, benefiting from the kind of unhurried, expert but often unorthodox examination they receive over the course of this volume. Science as It Could Have Been will establish itself straightaway as defining the state of the art, and will surely become a necessary reference point for all future work. Gregory Radick, University of Leeds
Contingency is an important topic that deserves far more attention from philosophers of science and other science studies experts than it has so far received. Science as It Could Have Been is the most comprehensive treatment of the central issues concerning contingency and inevitability to date. Anyone curious about this ongoing debate in science and mathematics should begin here. Thomas Nickles, University of Nevada, Reno