A Response to “The STS Challenge to Philosophy of Science in Taiwan”

When Professor Ruey-Lin Chen invited me to respond to an article that he had written partly as a criticism of a few paragraphs in my 2002 article (Lei 2002), I felt both honored and hesitant. I felt hesitant because, in my humble opinion, Professor Chen stretches way too much the three noncentral paragraphs in my original article, one of them only a footnote, into what he characterizes as “skeptical discourses on the constructive function of philosophical debates.” I feel uncomfortable about using the valuable space of EASTS as a forum to clarify a noncentral point of my essay. On the other hand, I feel honored because Professor Chen has made such effective use of this misinterpretation and has turned it into a tool to call for a wide-ranging reform of Taiwanese philosophy of science. Rather than explaining and rectifying the unfortunate...