Vasso Kindi

In the paper I examine Collingwood’s historical metaphysics, i.e., the fusion Collingwood attempts between history and philosophy. Collingwood’s metaphysical analysis aims to identify and uncover the absolute presuppositions of a particular type of discourse or phase in history and, in so doing, it arrives at historical facts recorded by metaphysical/ historical propositions. I present Collingwood’s account and, to further explicate it, I compare it to two other approaches which also involve, or ultimately terminate at, some kind of description of facts, Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics and Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations. I bring out the differences between these three approaches but I also argue that their emphasis on assembling particular facts does not yield empirical but rather logical accounts which fold in historical and linguistic considerations. In Collingwood’s case, the historical dimension of his logical investigation is hermeneutical and developmental and highlights diversity.

In the present chapter, I argue that commentators who criticize Kuhn’s work are most often fighting a straw man. Their target is a stereotype that is not to be found in Kuhn’s texts. I will consider the charge based on the stereotype that the Kuhnian schema is not borne out by historical evidence and will argue that Kuhn’s model, which is not actually what his critics take it to be, was not supposed to be based on, or accurately depict, historical facts. It was not a historical representation but a philosophical model that was used to challenge an ideal image of science. I suggest that giving a more accurate account of Kuhn’s model will not only do justice to Kuhn’s work but also draw attention to issues that, because of the stereotype, have remained in obscurity.

In the paper I will, first, address certain apparent tensions in relation to Kuhn’s legacy in the history of science. Kuhn was a historian before he became a philosopher of science. He had done and published historical work, he only had history graduate students, he imbued philosophy of science with historical considerations. And, yet, his widely acknowledged influence on the history of science came mostly through his philosophical work which is, nevertheless, brushed off by historians of science as making dated overarching and generalizing claims when their own attention has been increasingly focusing on the local and the particular. Secondly, I will discuss how Kuhn used history, the facts of the past, in his historical philosophy of science and will present a reading that takes his model of science as a Wittgensteinian object of comparison. Lastly, I will argue that Kuhn’s philosophical work impacted developments in the historiography of science and the corresponding discipline.

The present paper argues that there is an affinity between Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is maintained, in particular, that Kuhn's notion of paradigm draws on such Wittgensteinian concepts as language games, family resemblance, rules, forms of life. It is also claimed that Kuhn's incommensurability thesis is a sequel of the theory of meaning supplied by Wittgenstein's later philosophy. As such its assessment is not fallacious, since it is not an empirical hypothesis and it does not have the relativistic implications Kuhn's critics repeatedly indicated. Although concepts are indeed relative to a language game or paradigm, interparadigmatic intelligibility is preserved through the standard techniques of translation or praxis. The impossibility of radical translation which is captured by the claim of incommensurability lies with that which cannot be said but only shown

Philosophy of science was formed as a distinct discipline in the early twentieth century around the work of the logical positivists, or logical empiricists, originally in Vienna in the mid‐twenties and in other European cities such as Berlin and Prague. It further developed in the United States, where most logical positivists moved to escape persecution by the Nazis or World War II and met the American pragmatist philosophers of science. Logical positivism, or logical empiricism, is the school of thought that is most responsible for the shaping of philosophy of science as a contemporary, distinct academic discipline in the early twentieth century. The historical turn in philosophy of science in the late 1950s and early 1960s has been associated mostly with the work of philosophers such as Stephen Toulmin, N.R. Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, who were active publishing books and papers at that time in the United States.

The Quest for Physical Theory (QPT) comprises the eight Lowell lectures that Kuhn gave on Tuesdays and Fridays in March 1951 in the Lecture Hall of the Boston Library. He was 28 years old at the time, a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a recent Harvard PhD in Physics (1949), and an instructor in the general-education course on science set up by James Conant, Harvard’s President. Kuhn seized the opportunity of the Lowell Lectures to present his new, and ground-breaking at the time, take on science which was shaped by Kuhn’s forays in psychology, philosophy, history, and logic. It is obvious from reading the lectures that Kuhn was very confident of his views and was aiming to jolt the public with his revisionary account. To a complacent audience, accustomed to the standard, textbook picture of science, he hurled the provocative claims that there are no pure facts, that prejudice plays a decisive role in scientific practice, that the then-current history of science fabricated mythologies about past science, that perception is not passive, and that the overthrow of a theory does not add to previous knowledge. All these claims more than foreshadow the basic elements of Kuhn’s model in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR). It is not just that the lectures speak to the emergence of Kuhn’s ideas that were later refined, as George Reisch, the editor of QPT, says in his introductory essay. The lectures show that Kuhn had conceived his model, almost in its entirety, very early on, which means that the much-debated influence exercised on him by later works, such as Toulmin’s, Hanson’s, or Polanyi’s in the 1950s, was secondary to the exploratory readings of his youth. These later influences must have solidified his early conception.

Vasso Kindi examines, first, whether Collingwood’s logic of question and answer, which was to replace the symbolic logic of the logical positivists, does indeed bear similarities to Bacon’s and Kant’s use of questions, as Collingwood claims. She argues that Collingwood’s emphasis on questions is more similar to Kant’s concern with presuppositions that make knowledge possible than to Bacon’s interest in pursuing and questioning nature to divulge her secrets. She, then, explains how Collingwood’s emphasis on questions is tied to his view that propositions are not abstract entities with intrinsic meaning in isolation from the network of presuppositions in which they are embedded. Finally, she suggests that the metaphysician’s task, according to Collingwood, is to ‘excavate’ different complexes of questions and answers until the absolute presuppositions which govern them are reached. It is this historical methodology that gives Collingwood’s metaphysics its distinctive character.

In the paper I consider how empirical material, from either history or sociology, features in Kuhn’s account of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that the study of scientific practice did not offer him data to be used as evidence for defending hypotheses but rather cultivated a sensitivity for detail and difference which helped him undermine an idealized conception of science. Recent attempts in the science studies literature, appealing to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, have aimed at reducing philosophy to multifaceted empirical research in relation to science. I discuss how this turn which is at odds with Wittgenstein’s philosophy, cannot be a continuation of Kuhn’s project which bears similarities to Wittgenstein’s

Up to the introduction of the term and concept of incommensurability by T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend in the early 1960s, scientific texts were supposed to pose no problem as regards their translation, unlike literature, which was thought very difficult to translate. After the introduction of the term, translation of scientific language became equally problematic because, due to conceptual and perceptual incommensurability, there was no common observation basis to ground linguistic equivalences between languages of incommensurable paradigms. This article highlights the presuppositions that link incommensurability to dramatic consequences (impossibility of communication, translation, and comparative evaluation of paradigms) and tries to sketch an alternative way of understanding incommensurability and translation drawing on Kuhn’s work. From this perspective, translation is not an all-or-nothing affair for either science or literature and becomes a problem to be solved for each particular set of circumstances.

There are two widely held views in the literature as regards Wittgenstein’s philosophy. One says that Wittgenstein in his later work appeals to ordinary language in his effort to show how the philosophical problems can be dissolved, and the other says that his investigation is a grammatical one. This paper undertakes to examine what is meant by a grammatical investigation, especially in view of the fact that this investigation relies on empirical facts that have to do with linguistic usage. The examination is carried out by concentrating on what Wittgenstein has to say on the issue of knowledge – in particular, how the way we use the word contributes to the dismissal of Moore's answer to the challenge of scepticism. The conclusion is that Wittgenstein's resort to ordinary language is not typically empirical. The examples of ordinary usage that he cites may be contingent, but they could not have been different given the language games they are part of. The correct use of words Wittgenstein appeals to is not fixed by some kind of essence, but neither is it decided by a majority rule. It gets entrenched in a complex nexus of practices. Wittgenstein's reference to “use” instead of ‘usage”and to “linguistic facts” instead of “sociological facts” lends support more to a logical than to an empirical investigation.

Ian Hacking urged that philosophers take a look at history. He called his recommendation the “Lockean imperative”. In the present paper I examine how Hacking understands the relation between philosophy and history by concentrating on his 1990 essay “Two kinds of ‘New Historicism’ for philosophers”. In this particular paper Hacking uses the visual metaphor of ‘taking a look’ which can also be found in the work of two other philosophers, Kuhn and Foucault, who are called by Hacking his mentors. I argue that in the work of these three philosophers, as well as in the work of Wittgenstein who has influenced both Hacking and Kuhn, one can find interest and attention to particulars which can be furnished by history, an approach which cultivates a sensibility for difference. I begin by presenting Hacking’s understanding of the relation of history to philosophy and then discuss what the Lockean imperative is. I concentrate on Locke’s understanding of history which differs considerably from the contemporary and end by focusing on the similarities in the work of the aforementioned thinkers