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Laudan’s Model of Axiological Change and the Bohr-Einstein Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Henry J. Folse
Henry J. Folse*
Affiliation:
University of New Orleans
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Extract

Since the publication of Science and Values in which Laudan unveiled his “reticulated model of scientific change” (Laudan (1984)), he has published a series of articles emphasizing the naturalistic axiology inherent in this model. (Laudan (1986), (1987a), (1987b), (1989), and (forthcoming)). His epistemic naturalism makes the business of fixing rational beliefs about facts, theories, methodologies, and aims all together “cut from the same piece of empirical cloth.” Laudan’s position has numerous attractive qualities: It allows one to accept a great deal of the wisdom in historicism without caving in to relativism. It allows one to accept the seemingly inevitable annexation of the theory of knowledge by the sciences and yet still maintain a normative epistemology. Finally, it awakens philosophers of science’s dogmatic slumbers regarding the axiology of scientific inquiry, and stimulates historical research into the relation between practiced means and professed ends in the sciences.

Type
Part II. Discovery and Change
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 77 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

Work on this paper was made possible by an NEH Summer Seminar directed by Prof. Larry Laudan, June-July, 1989.

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