ABSTRACT
For all of Kuhn’s insights into the history of science, most philosophers of science consider that something has gone seriously wrong in the development of the social studies of science since his time. Much of the motivation for the attempt to understand natural science stems from a (perhaps sexist) appreciation of its predictive power and explanatory depth. A related motivation stems from the (arguably “totalizing”) desire to identify its methodological tools so that they can be applied elsewhere (especially in the social and behavioral sciences) with the same theoretical insights and technological results. When an inquiry originally so motivated concludes that science is
But in the end there remains the relativist’s challenge to science as a distinctive body of knowledge, one that attains higher standards of objectivity and reliability than other methods. Dealing responsibly with this challenge requires that we return to the fundamental problems in epistemology, the philosophy of language and metaphysics, in order to see where philosophy went wrong and what led the radical followers of Kuhn to conclusions of such patent preposterousness. It may also require that we attend to the findings of relevant sciences, such as cognitive and perceptual psychology, to discover whether there are theory-free sources of data and hypothesis formation in our psychological make-up.
