Humanizing Science and Philosophy of Science: George Sarton, Contextualist Philosophies of Science, and the Indigenous/Science Project

Abstract

A century ago historian of science George Sarton argued that “science is our greatest treasure, but it needs to be humanized or it will do more harm than good” (1924). The systematic cultivation of an “historical spirit,” a philosophical appreciation of the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry, and a recognition that science is irreducibly a “collective enterprise” was, on Sarton’s account, crucial to the humanizing mission he advocated. These elements of Sarton’s program are more relevant than ever as philosophers of science articulate research programs that take seriously the contextual factors, situated interests, and historical contingencies that shape the sciences we study. I trace the trajectory of a long-term philosophical engagement with archaeology that illustrates a succession of ways in which social, cultural, and political values configure inquiry, culminating in a program of collaborative research that raises the question of what role philosophers can usefully play when the challenges of humanizing scientific practice have centrally to do with navigating entrenched asymmetries of power.

Philosophy of the Field, in the Field: Philosophy of Science Association 2020/2021 Presidential Address

“…During this period, I was spending every summer in the field, mainly at Fort Walsh, a Northwest Mounted Police site in southwest Saskatchewan (Wylie 2017(Wylie , 2022. The field archaeologists I worked with were not following the philosophical debates, but they were quick to identify problems with the programmatic positivism of the New Archaeologists that illustrated virtually all the major issues then being raised by critics of Received View philosophy of science.…”

“…In other cases, philosophers play the role of gadfly, “shaking things up” in what Scheman describes as “transgressive” field philosophy (2020, 178). They disembed and critically scrutinize disciplinary aims, norms of practice, and assumptions, with the goal of ensuring that these don’t harden into “fixed and final doctrine” (Wylie 2022, 263, quoting Sarton 1924). Field philosophy also includes projects in which philosophers of science provide decision support for researchers and policy makers who are navigating “wicked problems” that arise, for example, from global climate change and the challenges of developing strategies for local wildlife and biodiversity conservation (Sarkar 2020, 332).…”

“…Kourany goes on to argue that these worries about “fact-shaping” were misplaced. Given the ongoing success of a wide range of scientific research programs, “scientific rationality appeared to be robustly healthy at precisely the moment that, to philosophers, it seemed to be seriously ailing” (2022, 230; Wylie 2022, 257, 263).…”

“…These are worries about fact-shaping that arise from an insight central to the aims approach to “values in science”: that the values which set a research agenda configure all aspects of research practice. While, on her account, philosophers have tended to set this concern aside as a pragmatic matter—a failure to realize ideals of value-free science in practice—scientists have taken seriously the implication that an “ongoing shaping of the facts” of this kind carries not only an immediate risk of partiality but also entrenches a path-dependent research trajectory that has downstream effects, including the potential to “preclude the discovery of other facts” (Kourany 2022, 234–35; Wylie 2022, 263).…”

“…Nonetheless, the basic architecture of his system has had remarkable staying power; to this day it sets the terms in which archaeological sites and assemblages are described, compared, reported, and, crucially, regulated as cultural heritage in the region. Roy makes the case that the displacement hypothesis, embedded in the conceptual infrastructure of regional archaeology, functions as an ideological commitment that both reflects and legitimates settler-colonial interests; it serves to dissociate the Musqueam from their heritage and to normalize violent displacement of one population by another as a “natural process in all human settlement” (2016, 33; Wylie 2022, 267). The 1948 news article from which Roy takes her title makes these eliminationist assumptions explicit:“Who were these mysterious people who lived long ago at Sea Island at the mouth of the Fraser River?…”