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A Reinterpretation of Harré's Copernican Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Edward Mackinnon
Edward Mackinnon*
Affiliation:
California State University, Hayward
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Extract

Rom Harré's proposed Copernican Revolution in the philosophy of science is a very ambitious undertaking. It challenges established views, proposes a radically new model for scientific explanation, and forces a rethinking of the foundations of the field. In his treatment of the natural sciences, Harré rejects all deductivist accounts of scientific explanation (whether these accounts are fashioned by rationalists or empiricists) basically on the grounds that such accounts seriously distort the methods of explanation actually operative in science. In the social sciences Harré, in collaboration with Secord, rejects mechanistic, positivistic, and behavioristic accounts of human behavior [5]. In place of these discarded interpretations he substitutes a new realism which stresses the role that models play in supplying accounts of observed patterns of phenomena in terms of the things and processes whose interactions are responsible for the manifest phenomena. This revolution, if successfully carried out, would indeed be a valuable contribution to the philosophy of science.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1975 , pp. 67 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

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