ABSTRACT
Ronald Giere is perhaps the most avid naturalist in the philosophy of science. Science is whatever scientists happen to do in the environment to which they are best adapted, namely, the laboratory. Giere's "naturalistic" strategy is to study scientists in their laboratory habitats, watching how they manipulate apparatus and draw inferences from the manipulations. The rhetoric of reconciliation aside, Larry Laudan is really restricting the normative dimension of the philosophy of science to the only area where it would seem to be ineliminable: namely, where it concerns our own interests in wanting to understand the history of science. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, Giere's focus on the individual scientist as the object of his naturalistic inquiry equivocates on the meaning of "individual." Any potted history of naturalism must start with Aristotle's advocacy of a unified scientific method, one with a strong geisteswissenschaftlich bent.
