Open events

History of science and philosophy of science have become more distant from each other in recent decades. One key reason for this disengagement is the fact that the majority of historians of science have not found mainstream ideas in the philosophy of science useful for the framing of their research questions, or for the construction of their research methods. Instead, historians of science have increasingly turned to social and cultural studies for their theoretical and methodological inspiration and resources. However, historians of science stand to lose a great deal by disregarding philosophy entirely. This is because knowledge, inquiry, truth, evidence and reality are important notions operative in scientific practices, and very often they are even actors’ categories. In this talk I offer a kind of philosophy of science that will hopefully be useful and even indispensable for historians of science, based on some ideas articulated in my recent book, Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, 2022). This pragmatist philosophical history of science takes knowledge primarily as an ability to do things (not merely the possession of information), uses “epistemic activities” and “systems of practice” as the main units of analysis, and understands truth and reality as concepts based on the operational coherence of activities. I will illustrate these proposals through the example of one extended study, namely my current work on the history of batteries and “battery science.”