General Philosophy of Science: What is it Now?

Further to my comment earlier about Scepticism and Philosophy of Science, some further thoughts about General Philosophy of Science:

General Philosophy of Science was almost entirely a twentieth century phenomenon. Before the 20th century, there was scientifically informed metaphysics and epistemology—I am thinking of Descartes, Locke, Kant and their intellectual heirs, philosophers who believed that science could teach us something about the structure of reality. The central problem of twentieth century GPOS, however, was new. What is the status of unobservable theoretical entities? What are they? And how can we know them? The problem was urgent because theoretical entities were increasingly a feature of nineteenth century (and later) physical science--atoms, fields, etc.

The idea that drove GPOS was that theoretical entities could be constructed from (or alternatively eliminated in favour of) sense data. This idea, which was also the founding idea of analytic philosophy, began its long decline in the 1960s, when Hilary Putnam introduced ways of talking about unobservables that did not rely on these constructive techniques. Putnam’s work was particularly attractive to philosophers because it showed a way out of the incommensurability problem that arose from Kuhn’s work, for incommensurability sounded to many like a reductio of the whole analytic programme. Now, a decade into the 21^st century, the problem of unobservables is no longer at the centre of analytic philosophy, and anti-sense-datum realism has become the norm. (In the PhilPapers survey, 82% of respondents leaned toward non-sceptical realism, and only 4% to idealism; 75% to scientific realism, and 75% to correspondence or deflationary theories of truth. The percentages don't change much when you look at self-identified GPOSers.)

Accordingly, GPOS has declined. How many top-twenty departments have hired GPOSers in the last decade? Very few, I venture: the assistant and associate professors who list themselves as philosophers of science are either philosophers-of-X (POXers?), GPOSers having given way to formal epistemologists or analytic metaphysicians.

GPOS does, however, live on, mostly in satellite departments devoted to History and Philosophy of Science—there are such units in Cambridge, Sydney, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Paris, Toronto—and also in a few philosophy departments that have chosen to develop specializations in philosophy of science—Bristol, the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia are examples that come to mind. In these departments, there are usually POXers devoted to physics and biology and social science, and a GPOSer who is viewed as providing support for the foundations. But the question that I think has not been resolved is how GPOS lives in an HPS environment. Has GPOS become, roughly, Kuhnian? Feminist? Is there a viable path for development that traces back to the Viennese origins of GPOS?

(Cross-posted at NewAPPS)

Most significant 20th century philosophers

Brian Leiter is running a poll of interest to readers of this blog:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/10/most-significant-philosophers-of-science-of-the-20th-century.html

He has acknowledged some significant oversights (Schlick and Hull). But as I point out here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2010/10/philosophy-of-science-in-20th-century-.html
I think the situation is worse without Duhem, Russell, Weyl, and a few more controversial others (Husserl, Foucault, Zilsel, and Weber).
Chime in, and vote!

Varieties of Evidence Redux

About a year ago, I posted three blog posts here, arguing that scientific evidence serves a more complex and dynamic set of functions in scientific inquiry than simply supporting hypotheses.  I've finally manage to work the idea out in a form that I'm satisfied with:

The Functional Complexity of Scientific Evidence (Draft)

I'm especially indebted to the commenters on this blog for the content of section 6, including Thomas Basbøll, Greg Frost-Arnold, Gabriele Contessa, and Eric Winsberg.  (I hope I've appropriate credit where credit is due there.  I was a bit stymied in how exactly to refer to a conversation we had on the blog, and so made the acknowledgments there fairly general.  Advice on that point is welcome.)

I hope I've managed to present it in a compelling way and answer the objections in a satisfactory way, even though I'm sure many traditionalist won't be convinced.  The goal in this paper is to motivate the need for more complex, functionalist, dynamic model of evidence in contrast with the oversimplification of the traditional-type model, to set out in detail such a model, to illustrate it with an example, and to reply to some basic objections.  I've got a second paper in progress which applies the basic framework to a variety of problems of evidence, from theory-ladenness and the experiment's regress to "evidence for use" and evidence-based public policy.  My central claim there is that this apparently diverse set of problems all share a set of assumptions, and the strongest way to solve them all is to adopt the dynamic evidential functionalism that I've laid out in this first paper.

One reason that I needed to whip this paper into shape is that I'm presenting on the topic of the sequel at the Pitt workshop on scientific experimentation.  Getting this in final form is part of finishing up that paper.  The working title there is "From the Experimenter’s Regress to Evidence-Based Policy: The Functional Complexity of Scientific Evidence."

If anyone gets a chance to look at the paper, I'd appreciate any comments, here or via email. 

Anjan Chakravartty on Brian Ellis, The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism, 2009,

A recurring theme on this blog is the relationship between (general) philosophy of science and contemporary (analytic) metaphysics. For those interested in the topic, the following review by Anjan Chakravartty of Brian Ellis, The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism, 2009, might be of interest:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20347
The review appeared a few weeks ago, but it fell between the cracks.

I was quite taken by these lines:
"The need for ontological explanations of this sort, exemplifying metaphysical necessitation no less, is not universally accepted among philosophers of science, and Ellis does not defend this need in the face of alternative (for example, empiricist and pragmatist) approaches to scientific knowledge. The motivation for the project of the book must, therefore, be taken as preaching to the already converted."

More on Science and Metaphysics

Two things on the relationship between science and metaphysics, apropos of the recent discussions on this blog (which I've followed with interest and wish I had more to contribute to):

1. Although I doubt there are many who read this blog who don't already read Leiter's, the recent entry on Jack Ritchie's Understanding Naturalism (and the NDPR review) seems very relevant, and their is a discussion going on in the comments of Leiter's blog.
2. Craig Callender has a draft of a paper on his website called Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science, and I'm sure it would add something to the discussion (and Craig would likely appreciate feedback on it).

Wish I could take the time to say more about these difficult and interesting issues, but it will have to wait, as grading beckons.

Specialist Views in General Philosophy of Science

The results of David Chalmers' philosophical survey are now out.

In an interesting comment on these results, Chalmers compares the view taken on various topics in the profession as a whole with that held by specialists in the relevant topic-area. In particular, Chalmers reports that in "general philosophy of science" (GPoS), specialists are less likely to favor scientific realism -- only 12% of philosophers as a whole lean toward or accept anti-realism, while 16% of the specialists in GPoS do -- and Humeanism about laws -- 41% of GPoS specialists are Humeans as against 25% of philosophers as a whole.

I find this striking. I wonder why the specialists should be more attracted than philosophers as a whole to a position that runs counter to pre-reflective common-sense. Chalmers suggests the following as reasons for such divergences in general (not particularly in this case): "(i) specialists making better-grounded judgments, (ii) selection effects in entering the speciality, (iii) specialists' judgments corrupted by an insider literature".

Maybe it works like this: published literature in a topic area will be more slanted towards "sexy" positions than to "common-sense" ones. Consequently, the readership within the sub-area will be somewhat biased against "common-sense". That's a bit like Chalmers' (iii).

What do other people think?

The Epistemic Role of Suggestive Evidence

This'll be my last post on this particular subject for a while, since this project has to go on the back burner for a while as certain other deadlines loom.

As Eric Winsberg says in reply to my first post,

suggestion is a causal relation, support is not. Whether E suggested H is a matter of historical fact indexed to a particular time. whether A supports B is a very different kind of fact; one which might vary over time, etc.

...

A dream or a blow to the head might very well suggest a hypothesis, but they are not evidence. the kinds of examples where we are inclined to call the thing that suggests a hypothesis "evidence" are the ones where the thing also supports the hypothesis.

In other words, insofar as suggestion is independent of support, it is purely a causal relationship. Now, I'm disinclined to admit a complete epistemic/causal dichotomy, as I think it is well-established that we rely on all kinds of causal relations in our epistemology. But I also think that suggestion has clear epistemic features independent of actual causal events. As I said above, suggestion is an ability in scientists that is trained, it is something we evaluate agents as being better and worse at. Making good suggestions is a kind of agential epistemic virtue. It's also not entirely the case that "Whether E suggested H is a matter of historical fact indexed to a particular time." Whether E is taken to suggest H is such a historical fact, but so is whether it is taken to support H. On the other hand, we can, looking back at the historical case, verify or evaluate whether E suggests H (this is probably clear to anyone who has had that "detective story" experience when reading the history of science, coming up with the hypothesis "before" the scientist), just as we can do with support. We can also identify alternative hypotheses the evidence suggests that went unrecognized.

Now, I won't deny that it is possible in some degree to re-construct many cases of suggestion as cases of support; rational reconstruction can be a powerful tool for fitting square pegs in round holes. However, I would argue that doing so is not only fairly unilluminating for understanding the practice of science, but also that it provides succor to skeptical arguments. It is my eventual hope to argue that it is precisely such reductive, mono-functional, uni-direcitonal accounts of evidence as support which are responsible for skeptical worries about, e.g., theory-ladenness and the experimenter's regress. Such skeptical worries can (and are) ignored, but the common refrain that skeptical problems are insoluble and irrelevant ignores the fact that the problem is internal to these common accounts of evidence. Compelling versions of anti-skepticism have always been accompanied by alternative theories of evidence in which the "E supports H" relation is supplemented by other epistemic functions. (e.g., Quine's view that treats evidence-statements and theoretical statements as symmetrically related and judged on their functional fitness in accommodating experience, for all its problems, provides an internal reason for saying that skeptical worries ask too much).

Examples of Suggestive Evidence

I argued in my last post and in the lively discussion in the comments that evidence has a wider variety of epistemic functions that is commonly appreciated and that those epistemic functions are not reducible to the "support" function. In other words, I want to characterize the essential features of inquiry not as an attempt to gather information that confirms or contradicts some theory of hypothesis, but rather as a complex, multi-phase, multi-directional set of interactions between evidence and theory, as well as problem-statement and other elements.

To be clear, I'm defining evidence in a very broad way: observationally or experimentally generated information about empirical particulars, including not only "raw data" but also models of data, basic interpretations of the data, and even rather generic statements about the phenomena. What I don't mean is what Greg Frost-Arnold suggested in his comment: that we reserve "evidence" for that set of data or information which is settled at the end of an inquiry as figuring in the "support" relation. That is, Greg suggested a dichotomy between "data," which serves all the complex roles I'm interested in, and "evidence," which is the end-product serving the traditional "support" role. While we can go far on this amendment to my argument, I don't ultimately accept it. A basic part of the problem is that philosophers tend to cut off the product from the process and then focus exclusively on the former. This is one of the cases where I think the best way to avoid the strategy is to insist that the product cannot be treated independently. Thus, the broader sense of evidence.

One forceful objection to my view (pressed especially by Thomas and Gabriele Contessa in comments) is that the only way evidence could serve any other function is derivative on and reducible to its function of supporting. Let's focus on my claim that evidence not only supports hypotheses but also suggests them. I think this works in the following way: the inquirer, faced with a problematic situation, surveys the preliminary evidence, which allows them to generate first an attempt to state the problem to be investigated and subsequently a hypothesis for solving the problem. In scientific inquiry, the ability to suggest hypotheses worth investigating further depends heavily on training and "tacit knowledge," but it is, I think, just as essential in naive, commonsense inquiry.

Let's look at some examples:

1. Consider a child attempting to grow flowers in a flower bed. She's rather upset by the fact that some of the flowers aren't growing very well, while those in a small part of the bed are growing rather well. Looking carefully at the garden during the day, she notices that the small part of the garden with healthy flowers gets full sunlight, whereas the other parts are shaded by the fence or a nearby tree. This suggests to her that maybe the difference is due to the amount of sunlight the plants receive. (Probably the initial observations suggest several other hypotheses as well, but she decides to choose this one.) Now, in order to really support her hypothesis, she'll have to do an experiment. . . .

2. A case from John Dewey's How We Think (1910) of inquiry involving an experiment:
   

   In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat or by decrease of pressure, or by both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds ? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. . . . (pp. 70-71, emphasis added)

3. A case from John Snow's work on cholera in the 19th Century: various kinds of evidence has shown that the effluvial hypothesis for the transmission of the disease was unworkable. From reports and his observation of cholera patients, Snow saw that the pathology of the disease began with intestinal symptoms, rather than symptoms of systematic infection such as fever. This suggested the hypothesis that some morbid material ejected from sick patients was subsequently ingested by those who became infected (and several of the histories of Snow describe it in just this way, that the pathology along with other facts suggested the hypothesis about transmission). Snow then went on to support hist hypothesis by certain epidemiological evidence. . . .

Now, I guess we can't deny that suggestion is a real process going on in inquiry. What is at issue is whether it is both distinctive and epistemic, which I'll attempt to defend in a subsequent post.

Exciting Trends in General Philosophy of Science

I'd like to resurrect in a way a thread from February, where Gabriele posted about whether general philosophers of science are becoming an endangered species and Eric worried about the decline of general philosophy of science. I want to register a dissenting opinion; it seems to me that exciting discussions in general phil sci are on the rise, and this is one of the more exciting times to be working in general philosophy of science.

In comments, Mohan Matthen suggested that there may have been a progressive problem-shift in the area. If one defines the discipline by way of a specific set of questions, this may make it look like the discipline is in decline. I see a discipline regaining its prominence by taking on a more fruitful set of questions and projects. One direction is the move towards formal analyses. The move to engage with mainstream M&E is another. Work on mechanisms and models, insofar as it can be said to be general, is another. Here are some other new projects that interest me:

1. History of Philosophy of Science—To me, this is a very exciting development, though perhaps the one least likely to be recognized as a proper part of general philosophy of science. We're now starting to recover the early history of the field, both the various pre-20th century influences and the 20th century movements that led to the shape of the discipline today. The work by folks like Alan Richardson, George Reisch, Thomas Uebel, Don Howard, Heather Douglas, Jordi Cat, Nancy Cartwright, Michael Friedman and others uncovering the original interests and motivations of the members of the Vienna Circle is one of the best examples. This is great for general philosophy not only because it helps us remember why these general projects were important in the first place (no small achievement!), but also because it (a) reminds us of other projects which may have largely been forgotten about and (b) shows us that there are significant differences between the "received view" of what certain projects mean and the original projects themselves.
   
   An example of (a) is Neurath's project of attempting to identify and help bridge "gaps" between different areas of science, which differs significantly from most familiar discussions of "intertheoretic reduction" and "unity of science" by being a more practical aid to scientists and the consumers of science. There is a related example of (b), since this goal was part and parcel of Neurath's conception of the Unity of Science movement, and these histories have uncovered that members of that movement like Neurath, Frank, and Dewey were up to something very different than what Feyerabend, Dupré, and others were attacking.
   
   Turning back to history can often be a source of renewal for philosophy. It can shake our assumptions, offer radically different perspectives, and spur a change of approach. Philosophers of science turning back to the history of the discipline promises to be the beginning of a renewal of the field.
   
   
2. Values in Science—This is not exactly a new area, but it is definitely one that is receiving a new life in recent years. Talk of "cognitive values" has been around for quite a while, but in the 1970's, for suggesting that science was susceptible not only to epistemic and metaphysical analysis, but moral and political critique (among other things), Feyerabend was considered to have gone off the rails. In the 1990's, a small but important cadre of feminist philosophers insisted on important relationships between science and values. In recent years, gladly, there has been an explosion of such work. Recent work examines in detail the complex relations between science, ethics, social values, and public policy. Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy is obviously a landmark work, as much as for who produced it as for its contents (though the contents, blending methods from philosophy of science and political philosophy, provides ). Putnam, Longino, Kourany, Douglas, Howard, and Martin Carrier have also made exciting contributions, and there is an exciting group of scholars coming out of Bielefeld (e.g. Justin Biddle) who are exploring such topics. One of the great discoveries of HOPOS in recent years is that many of the original logical positivists, other members of the Unity of Science movement, and the founders of the journal Philosophy of Science were strongly concerned with issues of science, values, and politics.
   
   
3. Evidence—Beyond talking about how evidence confirms hypotheses in a general way, there has been a lot of interesting work recently on the nature of evidence. John Worrall, Nancy Cartwright, and a group of students at LSE have been doing some fantastic work on evidence for use and so-called "evidence-based policy." Work on topics like experimental evidence and robustness is another interesting case. The work of Allan Franklin, Kent Staley, and Jacob Stegenga are also good examples.
   
   
4. Simulation—Though I haven't figured out my own views on the matter, I've been following the recent work on computer simulations with great interest. Simulations are used across a broad variety of sciences, and they may well differ in interesting way from theories, mathematical models, and experimental measurements. The work of Margaret Morrison, Wendy Parker and Eran Tal comes to mind.

So, while many traditional topics like realism, confirmation, explanation, paradigms, &c. seem to be significantly less popular, many areas seem quite vibrant!

[Thanks Gabriele and everybody for inviting me to join the blog!]

The role of mathematics in the study of evolution

The population biologist, James Crow, in an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Biology, reminds us of Ernst Mayr's challenge (in 1959) to explain the relevance of mathematical models to evolutionary studies. In Mayr's words the challenge is "what, precisely, has been the contribution of this mathematical school to the evolutionary theory, if I may ask such a provocative question?". Crow's 2009 response is pretty typical of the responses made by mathematical evolutionists (including Haldane) back in the early 1960s: a laundry list of evolutionary problems solved by mathematics. While, this sort of response has value, it isn't general enough for philosophers of science. Further, some of the problems solved were mathematical to begin with. Mayr is clearly asking what role mathematics plays in the biological sciences, not in the mathematical sciences.

How should philosophers respond? Chris Pincock, for one, is working on a book that explores this issue. I hope this post prompts Chris to reply.

For what it is worth, I have a couple of half-backed ideas to initiate a list of how mathematical models contribute to evolutionary biology in particular and perhaps science in general. What I am really hoping is for some of you to point me to some of the relevant philosophical literature. Or, even better, I hope some of you add to the list.

Invoking A. Garfinkel (1982), I think one of the crucial contributions mathematical models make to sciences is that they allow us to consider what could have been otherwise (which, on some theories of causation, help us understand causal relations between events). Garfinkel's example is from population ecology, in particular the Lotka-Volterra equation which tracks the dynamics of population levels between preditors and prey. I can't represent the equation in this webpost but you all know the basic idea: the influences on the population numbers of preditors and prey are modeled in terms of the frequency in which the preditors encounter and eat their prey. From higher frequency of encounters we can predict that the population of prey organisms will go down. From observation alone we might confirm that a particular rabbit was eaten by a particular fox at a particular time. But, what observation doesn't tell us and what the L-V equation does is what would have happened had the particular rabbit not been eaten by the particular fox. If the population of foxes is high enough (and the rabbit popuation is low enough) then it is relatively likely the rabbit would have been eaten anyhow (by a different fox). If the population of foxes is low enough (and the rabbit population is high enough) then the chance of the rabbit getting eaten is relatively lower.

This one is a bit more vague. This time I'm channeling Poisson, Quetelet, LaPlace, and Gauss (and Strevens has an excellent book on the topic--Bigger than Chaos). One of the remarkable discoveries in the empirical sciences is the existence of large scale regularities that emerge from a "chaos" of individual variation. Extinction and adaptive speciation are two examples from evolutionary biology, predator/prey relations is an example from ecology. From physics we have gas laws. From demography there are sex ratio skews (towards boys found in England in the 18th and 19th century), and crime data in Paris that showed consistent crime rates in the 1820s despite the variety of ways crimes are committed (among a host of other found demographic phenomena). In economics Adam Smith hypothesized that well-ordered economies emerge from the variety of ways that individuals strive (unfettered) for their own reproductive success. Statistical data helped us see these patterns but probability theory (law of large numbers, central limit theorem) allowed us to see how these patterns could possibly emerge without the interference of external forces. Placed in historical context this application of mathematics (in the form of probability theory) was crucial in distinguishing the naturalistic sciences from theology. Before Gauss, Poisson, and LaPlace, people thought that, for example, the sex ratio skew towards boys was part of God's plan to make sure there are enough men for women to marry (after all many bachelors die in war). So, mathematics plays a role in explaining how large scale regularities emerge without reference to special external forces.

Incidentally, I think Darwin's version of natural selection relies a bit on both a rather primitive form of probability theory (in the form of what every gambler knows--that even slightly weighted dice gives the player an advantage or disadvantage) and an external force, or a force external to the mere lives, deaths, and reproductive activities of individuals. Crucial for Darwin's theory of natural selection is that a struggle for existence "inevitably follows" the Malthusian crush of population growth against resource restrictions. The struggle due to population growth is the natural selector and a condition that is external to individual life histories. But, modern versions of natural selection have downplayed the role of population growth. Evolution by natural selection has no need for an external force. Adaptive speciation (as shown by more sophisticated probabilistic models) can emerge from individuals who vary in their reproductive qualities.

Well, this has gone on long enough....

Reduction Then and Now

As Eric Schliesser explains in his recent post and comments, the old Unity of Science project is dead. That project had two main aims. One of these was to reduce the substantive claims of all science to those of physics. For instance, biology was to be shown to arise from biochemistry, biochemistry in turn from physics. In order to achieve this, the terms of the “special sciences” had to be reduced to those of physics: gene to DNA segment to some physical term. In short: all causal claims were to be reduced to claims about the entities of physics, and the special sciences themselves are reduced to sets of existential claims about certain combinations of the entities of physics.

This project died with the autonomy of science movement. Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, and Philip Kitcher all argued that the claims of the special sciences did not depend in any way on the reduction to physics, and that the causal claims of these sciences could hold independently of their physical realization. For instance, Mendel’s Laws depend only on the independent segregation and recombination of genes, and their underlying structure is unimportant. This meant that the original unreduced meaning of the term gene was indispensable to biology, and the whole reduction process described above is nugatory.

In recent years, we have seen two rather controversial developments in this area – and because of the weakness of general philosophy of science they have not been properly scrutinized from the perspective of scientific methodology.

The first development is autonomy gone ontological. One example occurs in philosophy of biology where it has been claimed that natural selection and drift are “population level causes” in the sense that they act on populations in a way that has nothing to do with causes that act on individual organisms. This goes much further than the claim that populations (cp genes) are constituted by structural features that are indifferent to particular realizations. This is an extreme application of the autonomy arguments.

The second development is ontology being pushed deeper than physics. In the 1920s, Bertrand Russell argued that the terms of physics are functional: mass is nothing but resistance to acceleration; charge, once again, is to be understood interactionally. He asked what intrinsic properties of matter underlay these functional terms. Russell proposed a “neutral monism” in answer to this question, on which the fundamental properties of matter were the stuff of consciousness.

Recently, this proposal has been revived by David Chalmers and Daniel Stoljar, who suggest that the fundamental and intrinsic properties of matter are “protophenomenal”. Consciousness arises out of these deep properties of matter, as do the interactional properties described by physics. This seems like a radical application of the old Unity assumptions.

Both these developments beg for the critical discourse of general philosophers of science. C’mon girls and guys: where are you? Are these uses of Unity/Disunity of science maxims legitimate?

On the decline of general philosophy of science

I could have added this to Gabriele's posting ("Are General Philosophers of Science Becoming an Endangered Species?" 11-2-09), but this way I can say hello to the group and thank Gabriele for inviting me to the blog.
First, I agree with Ed Machery (and Mohan Matthen) that much terrific general philosophy of science is conducted within or is an important byproduct from philosophy of a particular science. (My favorite examples are besides Craver, Bill Wimsatt's work.) I would add to this also history of science (see Howard Stein and George Smith, etc) and history of philosophy of science (Michael Friedman, Alan Richardson, etc).
Second, Ed and Mohan are a bit too quick in dismissing Gabriele's general concern. For one cannot deny that general philosophy of science lacks a certain urgency. (For example, see the fate of some of its leading lights: Michael Friedman's turn to history; Bas van Fraassen's turn to existentialism and religion; Kitcher's turn to public policy of science and opera.) This lack of urgency contrasts with three distinct earlier episodes. I) In the half-century aftermath of the publication of Newton's principia, there was a general debate about its metaphysics, methodology, and epistemology. The debate was between those that argued that philosophy could *limit itself* to a mathematical-empirical approach (Galileo, Newton, Cotes, MacLaurin) and those that thought that reason required a more general foundation (in our ideas, in principle of sufficient reason, in some bed-rock certainty, etc--think Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume of the Treatise). II) A second serious debate occured in the wake of Kant's success in forestalling and transforming the crisis within philosophy. This discussion was most intense in Britain where in the wake of the developing professionalization of science, philosophers discussed the methodology of science (Whewell, Jones, Mill, but also Maxwell and Peirce, Mach, Comte, etc). This was still the domain of general philosophy (and science) III) Professional philosophy of science (with its own journals and professionals) was born around the turn of the twentieth century. It arose from debates within neo-Kantianism in which epistemology was the first science. In this climate the philosophy of science had a very crucial purpose: if the results of science are the ideal of rationality then philosophy of science is the core of the first science (epistemology or in its Carnapian guise, the logic of science). This project intensified after the shock of the Einsteinian revolution. (It probably died somewhere early in the cold war.) If my potted history is accurate then Mohan's snap-shot of mid 20th century of science is an example of what happens to a research project that 'forgets' its own animating questions and becomes a problem-solving 'science' (with journals, conferences, fashions) that has a 'history' of circa 20 years (and, given the high barriers of entry to particular philosophy of science, can become, thus, unattractive to newcomers).
Third, this also suggests why Robert Northcott's creative proposal (philosophy of science as a bridge between M&E and particular philosophy of sciences [it reminds one of Neurath's and Carnap's project for unified language of science]) is doomed to fail. 'Our' leading M&E projects (derived from the work of David Lewis) appear designed (despite the language of naturalism, materialism, etc) to avoid 'contact' with science at all cost. Our services are not wanted!
Fourth, if I am correct, then general philosophy of science can only become animated if either contemporary M&E (or ethics, etc) has a need for it or if some general philosopher of science writes such impressive works of philosophy that can attract attention of discipline as a whiole.