Philosophy of Science and Science Studies in the West: An Unrecognized Convergence

During the 1990s the dominant research programs from the 1970s and 1980s in both philosophy of science and interdisciplinary science studies seemed to reach dead ends. During the same period, new and interestingly convergent research programs emerged in both philosophy of science and science studies, but their mutual relevance was not widely recognized. In earlier work, I called attention to important developments in anthropology, history, and feminist scholarship as “cultural studies of science” that rejected epistemological assumptions widely shared among both philosophers and sociologists of scientific knowledge. Here I highlight four subsequent developments in philosophy that constructively engage this new work in science studies: (1) a resurrection of interest in causality, (2) work on theoretical models and their relations to model laboratory systems, (3) finer-grained accounts of conceptual articulation in the sciences, and (4) broader philosophical work on the relation between conceptual understanding and perceptual and practical skill.