ABSTRACT
The problem-field in the early-mid 1970s in the philosophy of science was characterized by two main lines of criticism of the recently hegemonic positivist account of science. There was an anti-monistic strand, typified by the work of writers such as Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Sellars and Kuhn, which focused on the social character of science and highlighted the phenomena of scientific change and development. This strand I wove into my account of the ‘transitive’ or epistemological dimension in the philosophy of science. Then there was an anti-deductivist strand, represented by philosophers like Scriven, Hesse and Harré, which paid attention to the role of models and analogies in science and sustained some notion of the stratification of scientific knowledge. This feature of the second strand formed the base-line for my account of the ‘intransitive’ or ontological dimension in the philosophy of science.
