دانلود کتاب علم شناسی – چالش های ایجاد نظریه تغییر علمی

Over the last half-century, the contributions of historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists have produced a richer, more complex portrait of science, its past, and its transformations than was once appreciated. This more comprehensive understanding of science and its dynamics has thrown the inadequacies of past theories of scientific change, like those proposed by Fleck, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan, and earlier by the logical positivists, into stark relief. Many of these theories aimed not only to account for scientific change across diverse contexts, but – by clarifying the mechanism of this change – to illuminate how science ought to change. While the classic theories of the logical positivists envisaged a mechanism of scientific change driven by a transhistorical scientific method, the richer portrait of science emerging from subsequent and ongoing work evinces that no single method exists. Rather, there seem to be myriad methods employed across the sciences and their histories. This presents an intimidating challenge facing anyone who attempts to construct a comprehensive theory of scientific change today: to account for the diversity and change of scientific theories as well as the diversity and change of these scientific methods. The challenges facing any prospective theoretician of scientific change do not stop at the dynamic and diverse methods of sciences. For instance, if the means by which scientific communities assess rival scientific theories are diverse and change through time, it becomes less straightforward how the descriptive project of understanding science’s changes can inform a normative project of how science ought to change, or if it should at all (Rupik 2019). Our growing appreciation for science’s variety, social nature, and transformations task theoreticians to confront a number of claims. These include the claim that there may be nothing stable and common among the sciences or scientific changes, that there may be nothing that distinguishes scientific changes from other types of change in society, or that attempts to construct a theory of scientific change are doomed given the track-record of previous attempts (Barseghyan 2015, 81-97). Indeed, the same historical, sociological, and anthropological research that has empirically enriched our image of science can be used to render the very category of “science” so capacious as to be meaningless. For a growing number of scholars, however, these challenges are not insuperable ones. They see an opportunity to construct a more nuanced theory of scientific change that draws lessons from the failures of past attempts, and fundamentally embraces today’s empirically enriched portrait of science (Barseghyan, 2015; Scholl & Räz, 2016; Rupik, 2019). There is a commitment to integrate the history and philosophy of science in this endeavor (Integrated HPS, iHPS, &HPS; see Herring et al. (Eds.), 2019), enacting a more “naturalistic turn” wherein “matters of fact are as relevant to philosophical theory as they are relevant in science” (Callebaut, 1993, p. 1). It was only by considering the wealth of information now available about science’s history and practice, for instance, that members of the Scientonomy Community recognized regular patterns in the change of theories, methods, and questions that would form the basis of their own theorization. While this volume will not recapitulate these historical developments here, they were a crucial impetus towards taking the idea of a general theory of scientific change seriously again. The Scientonomy Community formed in Toronto in 2015 with the goal of refining and further developing a theory of scientific change first proposed in Hakob Barseghyan’s The Laws of Scientific Change (2015). By setting their sights on the transformations of epistemic agents’ theories, questions, and methods, they claim to have identified law-like patterns that appear to be common across time periods and fields of inquiry. The precise content and scope of these patterns is constantly in flux as conjectures about the laws of scientific change are evaluated on the basis of historical data and theoretical considerations. The theory aims to be descriptive, not normative, articulating the nomic regularities that emerge when researchers consider mosaics as their objects of study. Considering scientonomy a “science of science” has allowed the community to articulate how it has embraced the “naturalistic turn” in philosophy of science: the inseparability of theory and observation in the sciences drives the community’s commitment to explicitly weave the history and philosophy of science together as observational and theoretical scientonomy, respectively (Rupik 2019).