Science as It Could Have Been: Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem

473 Pages·2015·31.446 MB·English

by  Lena Soler, Emiliano Trizio, Andrew Pickering (eds.)

SCIENCE
AS IT
COULD HAVE
BEEN

SCIENCE
AS IT
COULD HAVE
B E E N
/
Discussing the CONTINGENCY 
INEVITABILITY Problem
EDITED BY 
Léna Soler, Emiliano Trizio,
and Andrew Pickering
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2015, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.
To Cathy Dufour, our very dear friend and colleague who suddenly and
prematurely passed away in March 2011.
Cathy was a bright, dynamic, and generous person, and a pivotal con-
tributor to the PratiScienS research devoted to contingency in science.
She always engaged enthusiastically in the various demanding collective
activities of the PratiScienS team. In particular, she actively participated
in organizing the international conference that gave the first impulse to
this book. There she gave a fascinating talk on contingency in the history
of quantum physics, which would have been part of this book had she still
been with us later to finalize a written version.
We miss her.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. The Contingentist/Inevitabilist Debate:
Current State of Play, Paradigmatic Forms of Problems and
Arguments, Connections to More Familiar Philosophical Themes 1
Léna Soler
PART I. GLOBAL SURVEY OF THE PROBLEM SITUATION
1.  Why Contingentists Should Not Care about the Inevitabilist
Demand to “Put-Up-or-Shut-Up”: A Dialogic Reconstruction
of the Argumentative Network 45
Léna Soler
2.  Some Remarks about the Definitions of Contingentism
and Inevitabilism 99
Catherine Allamel-Raffin and Jean-Luc Gangloff
PART II. CONTINGENCY, ONTOLOGY, AND REALISM
3.  Science, Contingency, and Ontology 117
Andrew Pickering
4.  Scientific Realism and the Contingency of the
History of Science 129
Emiliano Trizio
5. Contingency and Inevitability in Science: Instruments,
Interfaces, and the Independent World 151
Mieke Boon
PART III. IN SEARCH OF A CONCRETE AND EMPIRICALLY 
TRACTABLE WAY OF FRAMING THE  
CONTINGENTIST/INEVITABILIST ISSUE
6. Contingency and “The Art of the Soluble” 177
Harry Collins
7. Contingency, Conditional Realism, and the Evolution
of the Sciences 187
Ronald N. Giere
8. Necessity and Contingency in the Discovery of
Electron Diffraction 202
Yves Gingras
viii CONTENTS
PART IV. CONTINGENCY AND MATHEMATICS
9. Contingency in Mathematics: Two Case Studies 223
Jean Paul Van Bendegem
10. Freedom of Framework 240
Jean-Michel Salanskis
11. On the Contingency of What Counts as “Mathematics” 262
Ian Hacking
PART V. WIDENING THE SCOPE OF CONTINGENTIST/INEVITABILIST 
TARGETS: SCIENTIFIC PRACTICES AND THE METHODOLOGICAL, 
MATERIAL, TACIT, AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF SCIENCE
12. The Science of Mind as It Could Have Been: About the
Contingency of the (Quasi-) Disappearance of Introspection
in Psychology 285
Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin
13. Laws, Scientific Practice, and the Contingency/Inevitability
Question 317
Joseph Rouse
PART VI. CONTINGENCY AND SCIENTIFIC PLURALISM
14. On the Plurality of (Theoretical) Worlds 335
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
15. Cultivating Contingency: A Case for Scientific Pluralism 359
Hasok Chang
Notes 383
Bibliography 417
Contributors 443
Index 449
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We offer our greatest thanks to many people and institutions for their indis-
pensable roles in realizing this volume.
First of all, let us express our great appreciation to all the authors: it
is their investment of time and effort that brought the present project to
a successful end. We are grateful for their important contributions to the
still-underdeveloped issue of contingentism/inevitabilism in relation to
science.
Second, we acknowledge French institutions for their support of ac-
tivities related to this research program, namely, the Agence Nationale
de la Recherche (ANR), the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Lorraine
(MSHL), the Région Lorraine, the Laboratoire d’Histoire des Sciences
et de Philosophie (LHSP)–Archives Henri Poincaré (UMR 7117 of the
CNRS), and the Université de Lorraine. In particular, the support of these
institutions along with the Fondation des Treilles (Provence, France) en-
abled us to organize, in September 2009, an international conference on
the contingentist/inevitabilist issue, in which many of this book’s contrib-
utors participated.
We also thank the two reviewers solicited by the University of Pitts-
burgh Press. We greatly appreciated their helpful recommendations and
were very gratified to read their supportive comments. Many thanks as well
ix