Paul Cortois

In this expository article, a presentation is given of A.C. Crombie's life work in the history of science, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition. The History of Argument and Explanation in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts (1994). The importance of this work for the philosophy of science and epistemology is comparable to the more renowned work of the 1960's and '70s, but threatens to be paradoxically overlooked because of its gigantic proportions. (No thorough study of the book appeared up to now.) Crombie's earlier work started from a provocative version of continuism in the debate about the rise of modern science, ascribing the origin of the experimental tradition to methodological forebears in the thirteenth century (Grosseteste). Rather than revivifying this quarrel now, Crombie has offered us an emergentist picture of the rise of six subsequent major styles of science (using grand units of analysis) from the Greeks up to Darwin. These styles of thinking are superimposed upon another in that the definite breakthrough of each next style is consequent upon the recognition of the proper limits of the full grown previous style. In a first group, Crombie assembles three major styles for revealing regularities in individual phenomena, i.e. where the consideration of the collective to which the phenomenon belongs is not required for recognizing the regularity. Here we have (S1) the ancient style of postulating principles and entities according to a more or less apriorical evidence type or in axiomatic fashion; (S2) the experimental tradition from Alhazen up to Newton, and (S3) the style of hypothetical modelling, combining the former two in the vein of the rational artist as an (ultimately, also cognitive) engineer. In a second group the styles dealing with regularities discoverable only in a collectivity of phenomena are dealt with. Here we have the (S4) probabilistic style superimposed on the classical picture of rationality made up by the achieved styles in the first group. Then (S5) the taxonomic style is ready to be combined, finally, with S4, in order to discover the statistical economy of living nature in (S6), the 'genetic' style, culminating in Darwin's history of nature (which was to be expected). On the other hand, the latter style is traced back to the 16th and 17th century project of a history of languages and culture, of knowledge, and of mankind (which is a more surprising connection made by Crombie). In a final section some philosophical remarks are made regarding Crombie's project; mainly with respect to the larger perspective, in Crombie's terms, of an 'intellectual anthropology', or alternatively, in terms of a 'comparative epistemology'. Also the absence of a real analysis of the very concept of style is noted.

In this commemorative article the significance of Paul Feyerabend's work for philosophy of science in general is reviewed. Its unifying perspective is identified as the fight against any possible constraint on imagination (i.e. on the capacity of generating alternatives). This alternative-maximizing search was already central in Feyerabend's 'pre-anarchistic' studies. In fact, I claim that the really significant theses and arguments, as far as the intrinsic debate within the philosophy of science is concerned, were present in these earlier studies (criticism of the conditions of consistency and meaning invariance, pragmatic theory of observation, incommensurability thesis...). The context of the 'historical turn' is sketched in which these arguments were developed as aresponse to current views on science. But these arguments do possess an independent normative significance. As Feyerabend construes them however, this independence is uncertain, because it is the value of proliferating imaginative alternatives as such which partly conditionalizes the significance of these arguments (as it conditionalizes the very value of science itself). In this way the philosophy of the critical imagination could eventually turn the critical values against the philosophy of rational criticism itself. And indeed, (1)a certain combination of the tenets concerning consistency and meaning variance undermines the idea of crucial test, and (2) in Against Method xht panegyric of the imagination (couched in a new narrative of the history of science) is used as the main weapon to override any methodological account. Philosophy of science is now convicted of what is the only deadly sin — the murder of imagination. But science itself is also accused of the same crime: it has become not merely an ideology — which is nothing to worry about — but a totalitarian ideology, monopolizing epistemic and educational claims. I argue that, although the reintroduction within philosophy of science of such questions belonging to a philosophy of culture is called for as a complement for intrinsic approaches, the Feyerabendean way of treating those questions makes it impossible to state anything about the specificity of science within culture. On the other hand two 'master ideas' still seem apt to stimulate further discussion: (1) the critique of the consistency condition, backed by the attack on the thesis of the 'relative autonomy of facts', and (2) the defence of meaning variance, backed by the pragmatic theory of observation, and leading in turn to the idea of incommensurability. At the same time this idea of incommensurability could also play a role in a philosophy of the relation between science and culture (which remains to be developed)