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Socializing Naturalized Philosophy of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Stephen M. Downes
Stephen M. Downes*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Utah
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, 338 Orson Spencer Hall, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA.
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Abstract

I propose an approach to naturalized philosophy of science that takes the social nature of scientific practice seriously. I criticize several prominent naturalistic approaches for adopting “cognitive individualism”, which limits the study of science to an examination of the internal psychological mechanisms of scientists. I argue that this limits the explanatory capacity of these approaches. I then propose a three-level model of the social nature of scientific practice, and use the model to defend the claim that scientific knowledge is socially produced.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 452 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1993

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Footnotes

†

This paper was completed during a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. Arthur Fine, Steve Fuller, David Hull and an anonymous referee provided helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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