Thodoris Dimitrakos

The present paper examines the compatibility between scientific realism, naturalism, and empiricism, arguing that these three perspectives form an uneasy triangle: they can be coherently defended in pairs but not all three together. My primary focus is to show that radical empiricism and naturalism—whose combination constitutes eliminative naturalism—are incompatible with scientific realism. I distinguish between moderate and radical empiricism to show that while moderate empiricism avoids eliminativism, it nevertheless tends toward conventionalism, thereby blocking a robust version of scientific realism. This allows me to isolate radical empiricism for further analysis. I then argue that the view that truth plays an active role in explaining scientific progress (scientific realism) is compatible with the view that scientific theories are natural phenomena (naturalism) only if we reject radical empiricism. To support this claim, I use Boyd’s account, which combines scientific realism and eliminative naturalism, as a case study.

The present paper examines the compatibility between scientific realism, naturalism, and empiricism, arguing that these three perspectives form an uneasy triangle: they can be coherently defended in pairs but not all three together. My primary focus is to show that radical empiricism and naturalism—whose combination constitutes eliminative naturalism—are incompatible with scientific realism. I distinguish between moderate and radical empiricism to show that while moderate empiricism avoids eliminativism, it nevertheless tends toward conventionalism, thereby blocking a robust version of scientific realism. This allows me to isolate radical empiricism for further analysis. I then argue that the view that truth plays an active role in explaining scientific progress (scientific realism) is compatible with the view that scientific theories are natural phenomena (naturalism) only if we reject radical empiricism. To support this claim, I use Boyd’s account, which combines scientific realism and eliminative naturalism, as a case study.

This paper examines the dilemma of value-ladenness, which suggests that either the social world is inherently value-laden, requiring normative concepts to explain human actions and thoughts (anti-naturalism), or norms lack explanatory role, equating the social with the natural world (naturalism). The first horn implies a methodological gap between the social and natural sciences and risks representing humans as causally idiosyncratic, while the second risks ending up in relativism. My strategy is to treat normative propositions as constitutive principles in empirical research, retaining the explanatory role of norms without presupposing any methodological uniqueness for the social sciences qua social. The contribution of the present paper lies primarily in the philosophy of the social sciences. My argument, in brief, is this: if we take for granted the role of the functional a priori in empirical inquiry, and if we understand norms based on Anscombe’s notion of direction of fit, then the dilemma of value-ladenness can be dissolved.

In the present paper, I argue that, contrary to the standard critique, the Lakatosian conception of rational reconstructions is far from aiming at rigging the historical record and at turning history of science into parody. On the contrary, it can be a fruitful notion which creates an intermediate logical space between eliminative (or scientific) naturalism and aprioristic philosophy with regard to the philosophical comprehension of scientific change. However, I also argue that in order to be so it needs to be explicated and revised in the light of the examination of Lakatos’s attitude against naturalism. In particular, my argumentation is developed in three steps. First, I claim that the main reason for rejecting the criticism against the Lakatosian notion of ‘rational reconstruction’ is that forging the historical record would ruin the role of rational reconstructions as an arbiter for the assessment of rival philosophical theories of rationality. Second, I argue that we have to distinguish between the use of the term in the historiography of science and the use in the philosophy of science. I also suggest that we have to distinguish between the notion of ‘rational reconstruction’ and the notion of ‘normative explanation,’ and that we should employ the latter when it comes to historiography. Finally, I argue that Lakatos’s appeal to an alleged (Popperian or Fregean) third world of standards of rationality leads his view into incoherence. I propose a way to avoid incoherence by (a) abolishing the third-word metaphor and (b) replacing the inter-methodology, quasi-empirical process of assessment between rival theories of scientific rationality with an intra-methodology conception of the evaluation process.

In the present paper, I attempt to provide a reconstructed Marxian response to the question of whether the social (and behavioral) sciences constitute a philosophical threat to the autonomy of ethics. I suggest that shedding light on some aspects of the Marxian work (especially the Theses on Feuerbach), from the standpoint of the debate on naturalism in contemporary analytic philosophy, can offer valuable philosophical insights against the framework of scientific naturalism. This framework is responsible for presenting the social sciences as a philosophical threat to the autonomy of ethics. I argue that Marx detects and rejects three fundamental presuppositions of scientific naturalism: empiricism, ‘God’s point of view,’ and methodological individualism. I conclude that the Marxian view is a liberal naturalist perspective which allows both the scientific comprehension of the social world and the autonomy of ethics.

It is quite unequivocal that Kuhn was committed to (some version of) naturalism; that he defended, especially in his later work, the autonomy of scientific rationality; and that he rejected the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the traditional realistic conception of the world’s mind-independence. In this paper, I argue that these three philosophical perspectives form an uneasy triangle, for while it is possible to coherently defend each of them separately or two of them combined, holding all three leads to incoherence. Hence, the only option is to reject one of them in a way that is both compatible with Kuhnian historiography and philosophically fruitful. My purpose in this paper is not exegetical. My ambition is to sketch a coherent philosophical framework which does justice to Kuhn’s historiographical model for scientific change and avoids the philosophical costs of relativism and anti-naturalism. In particular, I argue in favor of the following interconnected positions: (1) Given the role of anomalies in Kuhn’s historiographical model, the latter satisfies the two fundamental conditions for acknowledging the mind-independence of the world: the ‘irreducibility condition’ and the ‘objectivity condition’, (2) Kuhn’s rejection of the notion of an ‘Archimedean platform’ does not entail that the truth-value of beliefs doesn’t play a role in the explanation of their change, (3) Adopting scientific realism is the only way to defend the autonomy of scientific rationality within a naturalistic philosophical framework. However, adopting realism leads to a liberal rather than an eliminative version of naturalism.

In this paper I am concerned with the relation between the history of science and the philosophy of science from the perspective of philosophy. In particular, I examine two philosophical objections against the idea that the history of science can provide evidences to the philosophy of science. The first objection is metaphysical and suggests that given Hume’s law, i.e. that norms cannot be derived from facts and given that the history of science is a descriptive enterprise while the philosophy of science is a normative endeavor, the former cannot be informative for the latter. The second is epistemological and is often called the ‘case studies dilemma’. According to this dilemma, we can neither deduce general philosophical theories from particular historical cases nor test the former through the latter. I argue that although those objections fail to be fatal for the idea that the historical data can provide evidence for the philosophical theories of science, they can help us draw a proper image of the relation between the history and the philosophy of science. I conclude that this picture presupposes the constant epistemic iteration between the two disciplines.

In this chapter I examine the relation between philosophy and the history of science in light of Hegel’s conception of skepticism. In particular, I argue that the history of science can and has been used as a skeptical weapon against efforts to determine the constitutive features of science; that is, against the philosophical effort to demarcate science. I suggest that Hegel’s critique of skepticism can cast light on this use of the history of science by revealing its inconsistencies and by showing that there is logical room between dogmatism and skepticism. Finally, I present Imre Lakato’s account on the relation between philosophy and the history of science. I argue that, despite its problems, Lakatos” account partly incorporates, even if implicitly, the Hegelian lessons for avoiding both a-historical dogmatism and historicist skepticism.

Friedman’s perspective on scientific change is a sophisticated attempt to combine Kantian transcendental philosophy and the Kuhnian historiographical model. In this article, I will argue that Friedman’s account, despite its virtues, fails to achieve the philosophical goals that it self-consciously sets, namely to unproblematically combine the revolutionary perspective of scientific development and the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. As I attempt to show, the impossibility of putting together these two aspects stems from the incompatibility between Friedman’s neo-Kantian conception of the role of philosophy and the role of the notion of incommensurability, and the framework of transcendental idealism and the radical character of scientific revolutions. Hence, I suggest that pace Friedman and pace Kuhn’s own self-understanding, the Kuhnian theory of scientific revolutions cannot be seen as ‘Kantianism with moveable categories’ and consequently we should either abandon the notion of radical scientific revolution or place the Kuhnian account into another, non-Kantian philosophical framework.

In this paper, I argue that Imre Lakatos’s account on the relation between the history and the philosophy of science, if properly understood and also if properly modified, can be valuable for the philosophical comprehension of the relation between the history and the philosophy of science. The paper is divided into three main parts. In the first part, I provide a charitable exegesis of the Lakatosian conception of the history of science in order to show that Lakatos’s history cannot be a caricature. In the second part, I describe what I believe are the real problems of Lakatos’s account on a metaphysical and on a methodological level. In order to address these problems, I take advantage of the recent critique of the so-called “confrontation model”. Finally, in the third part, I suggest that a proper modification of Lakatos’s perspective can resolve the aforementioned problems without distorting Lakatos’s central aspiration, which is that the philosophical theories of scientific rationality can be assessed with the help of the history of science without losing their normative content.

Kuhn’s account of scientific change is characterized by an internal tension between a naturalist vein, which is compatible with the revolutionary perspective on the historical development of science, and an aprioristic or Kantian vein which wants to secure that science is not an irrational enterprise. Kuhn himself never achieved to resolve the tension or even to deal with the terms of the problem. Michael Friedman, quite recently, provided an account which aspires to reconcile the revolutionary and the aprioristic elements of the Kuhnian historiography by placing the latter in the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. In this paper, I suggest that Friedman manages to provide a convincing description of the structuration of scientific knowledge and, further, to present science as a rational enterprise. I argue that despite these virtues Friedman’s account faces a major problem with regard to the context of transcendental idealism which he is not willing to abandon. I also argue that discarding transcendental idealism in the way the philosophical perspective of John McDowell does, we can dispose of the flaws of Friedman’s account while retaining its virtues.