A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour / Edition 1

by John H. Zammito

Overview

Since the 1950s, many philosophers of science have attacked positivism—the theory that scientific knowledge is grounded in objective reality. Reconstructing the history of these critiques, John H. Zammito argues that while so-called postpositivist theories of science are very often invoked, they actually provide little support for fashionable postmodern approaches to science studies.

Zammito shows how problems that Quine and Kuhn saw in the philosophy of the natural sciences inspired a turn to the philosophy of language for resolution. This linguistic turn led to claims that science needs to be situated in both historical and social contexts, but the claims of recent "science studies" only deepened the philosophical quandary. In essence, Zammito argues that none of the problems with positivism provides the slightest justification for denigrating empirical inquiry and scientific practice, delivering quite a blow to the "discipline" postmodern science studies.

Filling a gap in scholarship to date, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes will appeal to historians, philosophers, philosophers of science, and the broader scientific community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226978628
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/15/2004
Edition description:	1
Pages:	406
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John H. Zammito is the John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University. He is the author, most recently, of Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology and of The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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A Nice Derangement of Epistemes
Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour

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By John H. Zammito
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2004 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-97862-8

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Chapter One
"Positivism" has today become more of a term of abuse than a technical term in philosophy. The indiscriminate way in which the term has been used in a variety of different polemical interchanges in the past few years, however, makes all the more urgent a study of the influence of positivistic philosophies in the social sciences. - Anthony Giddens, "Positivism and Its Critics"

From Positivism to Post-positivism

To elucidate post-positivism one must both specify what positivism was-in both its general historical and its logical forms-and then spell out clearly what displaced it. Positivism is a long tradition of thought about science in the West, emanating out of the nineteenth century. Its effect has been to induce scientism, the idealization and privileging of natural-scientific method, conceived monolithically, for accessing truth and reality. As Hilary Putnam has put it, "part of the problem with present day philosophy is a scientism inherited from the nineteenth century-a problem that affects more than one intellectual field."

Positivism can be construed so broadly that it loses purchase as a conceptual discrimination. This is all the more true since it has come to be used pejoratively to signify whatever is distasteful about an opponent's position. Thus, all too frequently in postmodern discourse, positivism is used to dismiss any concerns with warrant or evidence, any recourse to empirical inquiry or to the rational adjudication of disputed questions. It is essential that we resist the tendency to identify empirical inquiry generally with positivism. Neither the pursuit of empirical knowledge nor the reflection on its procedures (methodology) or standards (epistemology) can simply be lumped with positivism. Things are vastly more complex. There is no intellectual justification for the rhetorical misuse of positivism.

The two key moments explicitly identified with positivism in recent Western intellectual history were the philosophy of history developed by Auguste Comte in the early nineteenth century and the philosophy of science developed by the Vienna Circle in the early twentieth century. It was Comte who coined the term positivism and gave it its two central theoretical dimensions-as an epistemology and as a theory of progress. The theory of progress involved both a theory of the overall advancement of the human race as well as a theory of the specific development of particular sciences. According to Comte, human thought originally deployed theological structures to order the world of experience: everything from primitive animism to sophisticated monotheism, in the measure that it postulated a transcendent agency governing the behavior of the human environment, counted on this scheme as theological. Gradually, and differentially by content, human thought progressed from theological to metaphysical conceptions of the world. Immanent but essential properties in the world came to explain the nature and function of the world. Yet these speculative entities ultimately proved inaccessible to critical appraisal. Finally, and again sequentially by field, human thought advanced to the ultimate stage of positive knowledge. This form was achieved first in mathematics and mathematical physical science in the seventeenth century, followed by chemistry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It would be achieved, Comte was confident, in biology, and ultimately in the study of human conduct, which he dubbed "sociology." This sequential achievement of the positive stage by the hierarchy of sciences propelled the progress of the human race. To Comte the pragmatic warrant for science was its incontestable and cumulative contribution to human flourishing. Positive science offered a more certain predictive grasp of reality and concomitantly such knowledge was utility in a Baconian sense: prediction was power. The conquest of ever new domains, ultimately the sphere of human conduct itself, by the methodology of positivism was both inevitable and welcome. For Comte "the coming into being of sociology is supposed to mark the final triumph of positivism."

Thus, the theory of history served as a powerful pragmatic reinforcement, in Comte's scheme, for the epistemological premises of positivism-relentless phenomenalism, antimetaphysicalism, and unitarian hierarchy of knowledge. Comte's epistemology built upon the critical thrust of Enlightenment thought, perhaps most centrally David Hume's combination of empiricism and skepticism. Thus, Comte maintained radically the traditional empiricist stance that there could be nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses, and he drew the epistemological consequence that there could be no evidential warrant, no claim to validity, which did not trace the claim back to sensory data. Consequently, nothing was more odious to Comte than recourse to transcendent or metaphysical categories, in other words, to anything which postulated the reality of what could not be confirmed by sensory observation. That was, from Comte's historical vantage, an unacceptably prescientific and obsolete approach to reality. Finally, Comte subscribed utterly to the view that all science fell under the authority of a unitary model and method, first established in the mathematical-physical sciences, and destined to triumph in all the other sciences in turn. The two elements of this commitment were the demarcation of science from all nonscience (which came nigh being labeled nonsense) and the effort to achieve a principled "reduction" or unification of all particular sciences into a singular theory grounded in physics.

Comte's ideas were taken up in the balance of the nineteenth century by a group of thinkers in both the natural and the social sciences. They attenuated Comte's schematic philosophy of history, but retained the association of science with progress, and they elaborated the epistemological dimension. Key figures here were Emile Durkheim in the social sciences and Jules Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem in the natural sciences. The implicit positivism of these thinkers involved their affirming a singular method for attaining valid knowledge, namely, the method of natural science, and a reductive ontology of science, namely, unity grounded in monistic materialism as articulated in physical science. This compound of epistemic and ontological positivism placed the social sciences in a position of inescapable inferiority vis-à-vis the natural sciences, and it relegated the humanities to a phantom realm of subjectivity. It was against this consequence of positivism that Wilhelm Dilthey and the German neo-Kantians struggled to develop an alternative conception of the human sciences grounded in hermeneutic interpretation, only to run afoul of the epistemological scruples of the preponderantly positivist culture. Logical positivism in the Vienna Circle was one of the direct responses to this quandary. It is aptly termed neo-positivism, for it endeavored to restate, with the full force of dramatically enhanced symbolic logic and semantic theory, all the core epistemological tenets of the positivist tradition.

One of the essential points about this reassertion of positivism is its equivocal attitude regarding the place of philosophy itself vis-à-vis science. On the one hand, logical positivism professed to see philosophy reduced "to expressing the emergent synthesis of scientific knowledge," a role somewhat akin to that which Locke claimed for himself in relation to the Newtonian synthesis-the "underlaborer." But at the same time, logical positivism held out for a strong sense of philosophy's sovereignty in the justification or legitimation of scientific claims to knowledge. Thus, against the well-publicized phenomenal empiricism of their approach, we must stress the primacy of their logicism. The Vienna Circle emerged precisely "to develop a view of science which would recognize the vital significance of logic and mathematics in scientific thought as systems of symbolic representations." By contrast, post-positivism can be construed as the belated fulfillment of logical positivism's professed subordination of philosophy to science, the "naturalization" of epistemology.

The story goes-and my account would appear to conform to it-that the post-positivist theory of science was the result of the challenge posed primarily by Quine and Kuhn to the dogmas of logical positivism articulated by the Vienna Circle early in the century and still dominant in the philosophy of science after World War II. Recently, revisionists have demonstrated compellingly that by the 1930s logical positivism had articulated internally many crucial insights which post-positivism has been credited with achieving against it only decades later. For example, a series of penetrating essays has demonstrated in Kuhn's work pronounced affinities to his ostensible bête noire, Rudolf Carnap. Indeed, Kuhn's work appeared under the auspices of the Vienna Circle series International Encyclopedia of Unified Science and was also received by Carnap with cordially expressed approval, not out of politesse but from substantial philosophical concurrence. While Kuhn failed to grasp the invitation to further accommodation until long after Carnap's death, he did come increasingly to find points of tangency with the theories of one of Carnap's most important associates, Carl Hempel. Much of the work of Kuhn after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appears to have been an effort to achieve rapprochement with the (positivist) philosophy of science he seemed to have repudiated in it.

Is, then, the whole idea of post-positivism misguided? I think not. But we must be much more discriminating in formulating it. That logical positivism anticipated key tenets of post-positivism does not really undercut Kuhn's claim that in 1960 interpreters still labored under a misleading image of science, nor does it erase remaining important philosophical differences that Quine, Kuhn, and post-positivism generally did introduce in philosophy of science. Quine, for example, did not seek to historicize the a priori so much as to eliminate it. That went well beyond what Carnap and company envisioned; they clung to the analytic-synthetic distinction well into the 1950s. Kuhn's dissolution of the distinction of the context of justification from the context of discovery was similarly more drastic than anything Hans Reichenbach and the logical empiricists were prepared to countenance. And Kuhn's introduction of a more radical historicism, though it had some affinities to what Karl Popper advocated in rivalry to logical positivism, went beyond anything Popper could countenance. As Evandro Agazzi has noted, the "Popperian philosophy of science" was "very far from an historicist way of thinking."

The mention of Popper raises perhaps the most important point. By 1960 it was not logical positivism/empiricism alone which prevailed in the philosophy of science, for it faced the sharply critical rival view of Popper, whose Logic of Scientific Discovery was reissued in English with considerable éclat in 1959. Kuhn's Structure might better be conceived historically in juxtaposition to Popper, not Carnap. At least it was the Popperians who represented the most energetic opposition to Kuhn over the next decade. Thus, the discernment of continuities between Carnap and Kuhn, important as this has been, does not confute the revolutionary impact of Kuhn's text; one must only reconsider its immediate context. The key idea was the historical contingency of scientific growth and change, something neither Carnap nor Popper would consider. Moreover, there were decisive features which Popperian philosophy of science shared with the logical positivists and empiricists: "Popper shared with the logical empiricists two essential tenets. The first is the conception of theories as deductive systems ...; the second was that comparison between theories, and thus the problem of justifying and interpreting theory change, was to be approached according to a deductive model focused on the relation of logical deducibility between the axioms of the theories and some single sentences belonging to them." Post-positivism set about overthrowing just this commitment to the logical entailment or "sentential view of theories." The notion of semantic holism which under-girded post-positivism denied that the meaning of terms used in two different theories (languages) remained identical, and with this meaning variance all strict logical deducibility was undermined.

A central tenet of logical positivism/empiricism was the theory/observation distinction. It was only because observations were independent of theories that they could serve as evidential warrants to appraise the adequacy of theories, to ground theory comparison. "The observational vocabulary provided an objective ('theory independent') basis for interpreting and judging single theories." But post-positivism would demonstrate definitively that this essential distinction could not be upheld. The most common formulation of this post-positivist principle is the "theory-ladenness of observation." The point is simply that "'observation terms' ... are not ... completely free from 'theory.'" There is no "neutral observational vocabulary." Instead, "what counts as an observation, and the interpretation or meaning of observation terms is at least partly [theory-] dependent." In this sense, post-positivism picks up a line of criticism launched by an early antipositivist, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote famously: "facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations." The suggestion that observations always entail a theoretical frame for their discernment played a central role in Pierre Duhem's argument that "crucial experiments" could never definitively refute theories: adjustments could always be made regarding the background assumptions to excuse the failure of an experiment. This "Duhem thesis" is the centerpiece upon which post-positivism in science rests, as we will have occasion to explore in detail.

What post-positivism did was to generalize Duhem's principle into philosophy of language as a claim for "semantic holism." In other words, words only mean in sentences; sentences only mean in languages; and therefore one can grasp a specific semantic content only from the vantage of the entire language. As a corollary, a change in any element will ripple across the entire web of belief. These are decisive interventions associated with Quine's philosophy of language, and they are constitutive for post-positivist philosophy of science.

Quine wreaked further havoc with two other demarcation projects dear to logical positivism/empiricism: the analytic/synthetic distinction and the science/nonscience demarcation. From the vantage of Quine's analysis, neither could stand up, and Carnap's carefully crafted categorization of "internal" versus "external" questions fell into acute quandary. Kuhn and Feyerabend would contest one further demarcation, that between facts and values, by arguing for the theory-dependence of standards. The result was to make the very idea of a theory thoroughly problematic. For the logical positivists/ empiricists it had signified primarily an interpreted axiomatic system. But Kuhn's historicization drastically extended the idea of theory to encompass background knowledge and to allow internal mutation within theories, rendering them thus difficult to recast in terms of formal logic. Theory became a term without a concept. "There is today," Shapere wrote in 1984, "no completely-one is almost tempted to say remotely-satisfactory analysis of the notion of a scientific theory."

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. From Positivism to Post-positivism
2. The Perils of Semantic Ascent: Quine and Post-positivism in the Philosophy of Science
3. Living in Different Worlds? Kuhn's Misadventures with Incommensurability
4. Doing Kuhn One Better? The (Failed) Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science
5. How Kuhn Became a Sociologist (and Why He Didn't Like It): The Strong Program and the Social Construction of Science
6. All the Way Down: Social Constructivism and the Turn to Microsociological Studies
7. Women, ANTs, and (Other) Dangerous Things: "Hybrid" Discourses
8. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Radical Reflexivity and the Science Wars
Conclusion: The Hyperbolic Derangement of Epistemes
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Philosophers of science, science-studies practitioners, and science educators will find Zammito’s quasi-history of the post-positivist nature-of-science debates useful and formidable and sufficiently balanced to satisfy most if not all political and epistemological tastes.”

Science Education - Steven Turner

“Zammito systematically examines the philosophical movements of postpositivism (such as the linguistic turn, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism) with the aim of demonstrating that the extravagances of these movements resulted in the undermining of empirical scientific inquiry, natural as well as social. . . . Zammito’s analyses are thorough and well documented.”

Choice

Zammito sets out to trace the story of the development of anti-empiricist philosophy, that is, philosophy and sociology that deny that there can be decisive, objective, empirical evidence for any scientific claim. . . . His book is, in the end, a cautionary tale about academic standards, defending history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Some have gone too far, Zammito claims and we must return to what he calls ‘moderate historicism.’ ”

Isis - David J. Stump

“Zammito is admirably evenhanded, arguing always with nuance and never with a bludgeon. His book can almost be read as a cautious defense of social and cultural studies of science, although his was moved to write it, he explains, by his distress at the postmodern abandonment of the ideal of truth.”

Theodore M. Portern Historical Review

“Zammito is admirably evenhanded, arguing always with nuance and never with a bludgeon. His book can almost be read as a cautious defense of social and cultural studies of science, although his was moved to write it, he explains, by his distress at the postmodern abandonment of the ideal of truth.”

American Historical Review - Theodore M. Porter

Philosophers of science, science-studies practitioners, and science educators will find Zammito’s quasi-history of the post-positivist nature-of-science debates useful and formidable and sufficiently balanced to satisfy most if not all political and epistemological tastes.”

— Steven Turner

Science Education

“Zammito is admirably evenhanded, arguing always with nuance and never with a bludgeon. His book can almost be read as a cautious defense of social and cultural studies of science, although his was moved to write it, he explains, by his distress at the postmodern abandonment of the ideal of truth.”

— Theodore M. Porter

American Historical Review

Zammito sets out to trace the story of the development of anti-empiricist philosophy, that is, philosophy and sociology that deny that there can be decisive, objective, empirical evidence for any scientific claim. . . . His book is, in the end, a cautionary tale about academic standards, defending history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Some have gone too far, Zammito claims and we must return to what he calls ‘moderate historicism.’ ”

— David J. Stump

Isis