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Multivariate Models of Scientific Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Miriam Solomon*
Affiliation:
Temple University and The Dibner Institute

Extract

Philosophers are particularly susceptible to the temptation to produce what Donna Haraway calls a “TOE (=a Theory of Everything)” (Haraway 1994). Many of us like to integrate the methods and results of different disciplines, discern underlying unity in bifurcations and thereby—so we think—get closer to a single, true, representation of the universe. Proposals to integrate cognitive and social models of scientific change have come from philosophers—and not from historians, sociologists, feminist critics, anthropologists, rhetoricians or semioticians of science. The proposals are also responses to the growing influence of sociologists of science (e.g. Collins, Latour, Shapin, Woolgar) who have taken stands on epistemological matters, formerly the province of philosophers. It is common among sociologists of science to reject all proposals to integrate cognitive and social accounts, as well as to reject all cognitive accounts: Bruno Latour's famous moratorium on cognitive studies of science (Latour 1987, 247) is one example of this.

Type
Part IX. Integrating Cognitive and Social Models of Science
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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