Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science: Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs, and Waterbears

Calling Science Pseudoscience: Fleck's Archaeologies of Fact and Latour's ‘Biography of an Investigation’ in AIDS Denialism and Homeopathy

“…I've argued that this complex association deserves our attention (Babich 2003a(Babich , 2003b and in Thomas Kuhn, a recent biography, the social thinker on science, Steve Fuller, settles the matter on Kuhn's side by setting Fleck's influence in terms of a still broader context (Fuller 2001, 59-60) and casually replicating, as Fuller does here, the hierarchy of the sciences in the process: whereby Kuhn's topics would be physics and chemistry but Fleck himself would be labouring in the at the times not-yet science of medicine, then still in the throes, according to Fuller, of 'exchanging its artisan roots for a more experimentally based future' (Fuller 2001, 60). Fuller's comment replicates the key problem of philosophy of science (P and not-P as I call it, meaning physics and not physics-where P does not even include chemistry, to the fair indignation of those who write on chemistry: see Babich 2010) and is quite innocent of the very experimental context of Fleck's research expertise in biochemistry and cytology.…”

“…8 The distancing strategy is still more evident in the introduction Kuhn wrote for the translation of Fleck's book (Kuhn 1979), a translation initiated not by Kuhn (who in his reflections offers a taxonomy of fields and the social and other distinctions that follow from them, as departmental demarcations haunt many academic lives, not only Kuhn's) but by the US sociologist Robert K. Merton together with the English-based Wilhelm Baldamus (1977) learned much from reading that book. (Kuhn 2000, 283) 9 The more complex problem of Fleck's broader reception is beyond the scope of this paper: bridging not only (as Kuhn himself emphasizes in the taxonomic differentiation noted above) the disjoint fields of history of science as opposed to and distinct from philosophy of science-thus Kuhn points out to his interviewers after a long exchange in which he implicitly makes the same point again and again: 'although I'm the chairman of a program in "history and philosophy of science", there is no such field' (Kuhn 2000, 315)-quite in addition to the different emphases of the sociology of science and indeed, as I point out elsewhere with reference to Latour and others, the anthropology of science, to which one must also add the further hermeneutic and phenomenological, that is to say: continental (as opposed to analytic or mainstream) approaches to philosophy of science (Babich 2010). Nevertheless, the above themes, Given the economic constraints of the current day, especially in the academy, the growing trend in almost all disciplines is that of suppression by threat: say what everyone else says or (and this is a real and working threat) you won't be hired, tenured, published, or indeed read.…”

The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology

“…7 Friedrich Nietzsche (1980a). 8 Thus see Babich (2010aBabich ( , 2009. 9 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse , §22; Nietzsche (1980), Vol.…”

“…7 Friedrich Nietzsche (1980a). 8 Thus see Babich (2010aBabich ( , 2009 In my own Nietzsche-indebted overview of different approaches to continental philosophy of science-including philosophies of science other than the traditional preoccupation with physics that characterizes mainstream or analytic philosophy of science-I discuss both philology and method, echoing Karl Jaspers' along with Karl Reinhardt's additional refl ections, in order to argue for the clear multidimensionality of the philosophy of science itself: "The Case for -P Philosophies of Science, where P = Physics. "…”

Globalized Parochialism: Consequences of English as Lingua Franca in Philosophy of Science

“…Years ago already, in this journal, McAllister wrote a programmatic editorial emphasizing that science is not culture independent, and that philosophy of science should also encompass 'the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften as well as the natural and social sciences' (McAllister 2003, 5). Babich (2010), in her more comprehensive overview, brings up some important examples. Happily, the other articles of this symposium deal with some of them in detail.…”