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Scope of Scientonomy - Descriptive (Barseghyan-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 21:38, 15 June 2017
, 21:38, 15 June 2017no edit summary
|Prehistory=Discussions of scientific change have traditionally conflated normative and descriptive concerns. In the nineteenth century, [[William Whewell]] wrote that "The Philosophy of Science...[is an] insight into the essence and conditions of all real knowledge, and an exposition of the best methods for the discovery of new truths". [[CiteRef::Whewell (1840)|p.1]] Regarding the question of whether his theory should be taken as a descriptive or prescriptive account of scientific change, [[Thomas Kuhn]] wrote that it "should be read in both ways at once". [[CiteRef:: Kuhn (1970a)]] Belief in an unchanging true method of science contributed to this conflation, since the problem of identifying this method was seen as both a descriptive and a normative question. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 14-16]]
By the 1980's most authors agreed that the methods of science had changed over time, and that a theory of scientific change needed to account for both theory change and method change.[[CiteRef::Shapere (1980)]][[CiteRef::Laudan(1984a)]][[CiteRef::McMullin (1988)]] This recognition made it clear that the question of a descriptive account of science's changing methods is a different one from the question of what method science should use. Barseghyan argued that, as a science, scientonomy can deal only with descriptive questions concerning the history and theory of scientific change, leaving normative methodology as a separate field of inquiry. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015) |pp. 18-21]]
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