Hakob Barseghhyan (University of Toronto), Greg Rupik (University of Toronto) - From a philosophical perspective, one major rationale for an integrated HPS was the idea that the historical record of transitions in sciences could be used to test general philosophical claims about science. Once established, these general philosophical claims would then provide a theoretical foundation for explaining individual historical transitions in sciences. It is safe to say that this bold project of an integrated HPS has never really come to fruition. There is currently no clear consensus on what an ideal integrated HPS should look like and, specifically, on how this integrated HPS might address the historical reasons that led to the exodus of historians. In this paper, we attempt to identify the key reason of the dis-integration of the original HPS and outline a new approach that can fruitfully re-integrate key components of both history and philosophy of science. We maintain that the dis-integration of the original HPS was mostly due to the conflation of two distinct projects: the search for a descriptive general theory of scientific change and the search for a normative methodology of science. Attempts to test or even merely illustrate normative methodological dicta by means of historical case studies have been rightfully scorned by historians and questioned by some philosophers. These attempts would bluntly ignore the fact that the methods of theory evaluation are not fixed, but change through time; they would ignore that the actual methods employed in theory evaluation could differ drastically between different epistemic communities, different fields of inquiry, and different time periods. Consequently, they would often result in shoehorning ill-documented historical cases into the confines of a chosen normative methodology. Since the search for a normative methodology of science was not separated from the search for a general descriptive theory of scientific change, these unfortunate misconstructions of historical cases eventually convinced mainstream historians that any general claims about science – descriptive or normative – are doomed to distort our historical narratives and inevitably produce a caricature of a history. As a result, the contemporary history of science has taken an explicitly a-theoretical stance and revels in its insistence on the apparent disunity of historical cases. We argue that in order to successfully re-integrate HPS, we need to appreciate that there is a missing link between the descriptive history of science and the normative philosophy of science; this missing link, we content, is the descriptive general theory of scientific change. Thus, instead of continuing the questionable practice of illustrating normative philosophical claims by means of cherry-picked historical case studies, the philosophy of science, we suggest, must rely on the findings of a general descriptive theory of scientific change. Similarly, what any good historical narrative needs as its backbone is not some normative dicta of this or that methodology a la Lakatos or Laudan, but an accepted descriptive theory that uncovers the general patterns of changes both in theories and in methods of their evaluation. As evidence for this proposal, we will consider the work currently being done by a community of scholars that aims at establishing an empirical descriptive science of science named scientonomy (www.scientowiki.com). Our goal is not only to outline how scientonomy can potentially bridge the gap between history and philosophy of science, but to show precisely how this re-integration has already been implemented by the scientonomy community. By considering the theoretical underpinnings of scientonomy, we will demonstrate how it addresses the historians’ concerns that led to the dis-integration of HPS, and how it offers a fruitful way towards a re-integrated HPS.
