Philosophy of Science A Personal Peek into the Future

Abstract

In this opinion piece, the authors offer their personal and idiosyncratic views of the future of the philosophy of science, focusing on its relationship with the history of science and metaphysics, respectively. With regard to the former, they suggest that the Kantian tradition might be drawn upon both to render the history and philosophy of science more relevant to philosophy as a whole and to overcome the challenges posed by naturalism. When it comes to the latter, they suggest both that metaphysics has much to learn from the philosophy of science and that it offers an array of tools that philosophers of science can themselves appropriate.

Relativizing the A Priori By Way of Reflective Judgement

“…Where Kant imbued a priori status to Newtonian mechanics, seemingly enshrining it as eternally true, the supersession of classical mechanics by relativity theory demonstrated the dispensability of the Newtonian frameworkand with it, the deficient nature of Kantian knowledge as structured by universal and fixed forms of human cognition. Yet one view in contemporary philosophy of science contends that a certain formulation of the Kantian a priori can be retained (Reichenbach 1920;Richardson 1998;Friedman 2001;Ryckman 2005;Massimi 2011;French and Massimi 2013;Heis 2013). Following the neo-Kantian tradition of the early twentieth century, adherents have claimed that remnants of the Kantian a priori can be salvaged by contextualizing, or relativizing, the a priori to historically situated domains of knowledge or scientific paradigms.…”

“…… If one does not consider this goal to be attainable, then one should probably not call oneself a “Kantian”’ (1924a: 500; see also Kitcher 2000: 89). Proponents derive resources from the constitutive synthetic a priori principles of understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason , which Kant takes to ground the Newtonian laws of motion: rejecting the meaning of the Kantian a priori as ‘necessary and unrevisable, true for all time’, they embrace a second sense, as ‘constituting the concept of the object of knowledge’, or establishing the conditions of possibility for a given scientific framework (Reichenbach 1920: 48; Richardson 1998: 112, 120; Friedman 2001: 72; French and Massimi 2013: 235; Heis 2014: 18–19).…”

“…However, there is reason to suspect that this reliance on constitutive principles of understanding does not allow for a sufficiently rich account of relativization. For instance, Friedman describes the relativized a priori as ‘dynamical’, allowing for radical transformations from one a priori framework to the next (Friedman 2001: xii, 31, 41, 45–7, 63, 101, 118, 123; see also French and Massimi 2013: 232–3). Yet even though the universal and necessary status of Kant’s a priori has here been nominally rejected, the fixed and unchanging status Kant confers on constitutive principles must be retained – at least within the perspective of the framework they make possible.…”