Dissent and Diversity in Science and Technology Studies: Reply to Fuller, Kasavin and Shipovalova, and Turner

Abstract

My argument inMinority Report: Dissent and Diversity in Science is that Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend reconciled historicist and normative philosophy of science in ways that suggest a productive path forward for Science and Technology Studies (STS) and history and philosophy of science today. Though their influence on philosophy of science is generally considered significant, their approaches have been curiously neglected and misunderstood. Key to understanding their philosophies is to appreciate their shared, conscious adoption of a dialectical approach to science (Hacking 1981; Larvor 1998; Kadvany 2001). Their shared dialectical approach put change over time as central and focused on the production and transformation of theories and research programs, rather than an alleged correspondence between theories and the world, something that was simply a non-starter in the context of their post-Kantian Central European cultural inheritance. By contrast, we tend to remember Lakatos as a rearguard defender of reason against an emerging sociological approach and Feyerabend as a relativist who famously rejected any rules for science.