Hasok Chang’s Cambridge inaugural lecture is a fascinating and accessible presentation of his views on the mission of history and philosophy of science. He argues that one function of HPS is to provide a pluralistic perspective from which we can study the history of science not only in order to understand it, but also in order to recover forgotten experimental facts and theoretical approaches. The idea is that this “complementary science” will ultimately enrich current science and contribute to its public understanding.
I can’t claim that I have entirely made up my mind about Chang’s ideas. It seems to me that there are a number of different components to the package, and these can be discussed independently.
For example, I am quite ambivalent about Chang’s non-relativist pluralism about scientific knowledge – although I am not sure that I fully understand what it entails. Meanwhile, I largely agree with his conception of the relationship between history and philosophy of science: philosophy is a rich source of questions about the history of science, and historical scholarship allows us to refine our philosophy in a way that is often superior to purely philosophical omphaloskepsis. Chang likes to say that “historical fact is stranger than philosophical fiction”, which I think is spot-on.1 Finally, it is yet another separate question whether “complementary science” can be a productive mode of inquiry. My hunch is that science is too efficient to leave many fruitful avenues unexplored. But a hunch is all it is, and I would not bet much on it. It certainly gives me pause that Stephen Jay Gould’s magnum opus, which I have long found fascinating, can easily be construed as a sustained exercise in complementary science!
In any case, I highly recommend the talk, which is well worth the hour.
- Chang discusses his view of the relationship between the history and the philosophy of science at some length in his contribution to a recent volume of the Boston Studies (S. Mauskopf and T. Schmaltz (eds.), Integrating History and Philosophy of Science). Among other things, he says that we should stop thinking about integrating history and philosophy of science either “top down” or “bottom up”. Instead, we should think about it in terms of how an episode (say, of The Simpsons) relates to the concept of the whole series – perfect!
Raphael Scholl 