– What is, according to Chang, the complementary function of history and philosophy of science?
- Philosophy and history together provide an organized skepticism and criticism towards the undiscovered and forgotten parts of science. He discussed that the eliminated scientific theories can be brought back to the scientists’ attention. Although he supported his ideas with acceptable examples, such as cold radiation, which I have zero intuition about it, I tend to believe more on the survival of the best explanations, as discussed in Van Fraassen. I couldn’t see the pragmatic of reconsidering old, forgotten, somehow falsified and yet weakly standing theories.
- I believe the survival of the best explanation and rediscovering an old theory are not contradictory. The explanations survive if they meet the needs of their time and pave the way for new predictions or discoveries, until they are falsified by new tests. In contemporary science, we can still discard the survived theories based on new findings, brought by new theories or tools enabled by recent technologies. Here, we can go back to an old theory, satisfying the conditions we’re dealing with. However, this old theory now holds because of new technologies and advanced techniques (i.e. computational models) . Now, that old theory transforms into the best explanation surviving. In the case of heliocentric theory, people took it into consideration again because of the enhancement in observations, simply telescopes. Therefore, I don’t see the necessity to go back in history and find a theory in dusty shelves, if we already have a valid and working model/theory.
– What is a problematic in Pitt’s article?
- A problematic is a set of intellectual concerns required to be explored by scientists. They can be found in a context with relations, but they can evolve and change in time, creating their own history. That’s why we should admit that they can be considered in multiple contexts and we must avoid choosing the appropriate context to support our ideas.