Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-g4j75 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T03:49:52.492Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social Epistemology Meets the Invisible Hand: Kitcher on the Advancement of Science*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

D. Wade Hands
D. Wade Hands
Affiliation:
University of Puget Sound
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Philip Kitcher's new book is very ambitious in scope, more ambitious, certainly, than any of his previous books. Unlike Kitcher's Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism (1982), this is not a book that focusses on just one single issue in contemporary science or educational policy; nor is it, like his The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (1983) and Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (1985), a book that emphasizes just one relatively narrow philosophical topic. The Advancement of Science presents a complete, and quite general, position within the philosophy of natural science. Its purpose is much closer to Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) or even to Nagel's The Structure of Science (1961) than it is to any of Kitcher's earlier books. Kitcher starts off with an explicit epistemology, moves to a “goal” for science based on that epistemology, and then uses this epistemic goal as the target for the various methodological and social or institutional strategies that he offers.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , Summer 1995 , pp. 605 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arrow, K. J. 1959 “Toward a Theory of Price Adjustment.” In The Allocation of Economic Resources. Edited by Abramovitz, M.. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 41–51.Google Scholar
Bartley, W. W., III 1990 Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.Google Scholar
Bernal, J. D. 1939 The Social Function of Science. London: George Routledge.Google Scholar
Blaug, M. 1992 The Methodology of Economics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callebaut, W., ed. 1993 Taking the Naturalistic Turn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fuller, S. 1992 “Social Epistemology and the Research Agenda of Science Studies.” In Science as Practice and Culture. Edited by Pickering, A.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 390–428.Google Scholar
Fuller, S. 1994 “Mortgaging the Farm to Save the (Sacred) Cow.”Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 25: 251–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A., and Shaked, M. 1991 “An Economic Model of Scientific Activity and Truth Acquisition.” Philosophical Studies, 63: 31–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hands, D. W. 1993 Testing, Rationality, and Progress: Essays on the Popperian Tradition in Economic Methodology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Hands, D. W. 1994a “The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Some Thoughts on the Possibilities.” In New Directions in Economic Methodology. Edited by Backhouse, R. E.. London: Routledge, pp. 75–106.Google Scholar
Hands, D. W. 1994b “Restabilizing Dynamics: Construction and Constraint in the History of Walrasian Stability Theory.” Economics and Philosophy, 10: 243–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hands, D. W. 1995 “Blurred Boundaries: Recent Changes in the Relationship between Economics and the Philosophy of Natural Science.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 25: 751–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayek, F. A. 1935 Collectivist Economic Planning. London: George Routledge.Google Scholar
Hollinger, D. A. 1989 “Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States.” New Literary History, 21: 897–919.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirman, A. P. 1989 “The Intrinsic Limits of Modern Economic Theory: The Emperor Has No Clothes.” The Economic Journal, 99: 126–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirman, A. P. 1992 “Whom or What Does the Representative Individual Represent?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 6: 117–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1981 “Explanatory Unification.” Philosophy of Science, 48: 507–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1982 Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1983 The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1985 Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1990 “The Division of Cognitive Labor.” The Journal of Philosophy, 87: 5'22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1992a “Authority, Deference, and the Role of Individual Reason.” In The Social Dimensions of Science. Edited by McMullin, E.. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 244–71.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1992b “The Naturalists Return.” The Philosophical Review, 101: 53–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, P. 1993 “Knowledge, Society, and History.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23, 155–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lange, O., and Taylor, F. M. 1938 On the Economic Theory of Socialism. New York: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Mirowski, P. forthcoming “The Economic Consequences of Philip Kitcher.” Social Epistemology.Google Scholar
Nagel, E. 1961 The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peirce, C. S. 1879 “Note on the Theory of the Economy of Research.” United States Coast Survey for the Fiscal Year Ending June 1876. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Polanyi, M. 1962 “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory.” Minerva, 1: 54–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popper, K. 1959 The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rorty, R. 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rouse, J. 1992 “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” Configurations, 1: 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapin, S. 1994 A Social History of Truth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, A. 1937 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Rpt. Modern Library Edition. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Wible, J. R. 1994 “Charles Sanders Peirce's Economy of Research.” Journal of Economic Methodology, 1: 135–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar