Sixth Annual UK Workshop on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science
Revisiting the Aims and Methods of Integrated History and Philosophy of Science

18-19 April 2011, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge

Opening remarks by Hasok Chang

Good afternoon.

It is my great pleasure to welcome to you to the 6th Annual UK Integrated HPS Workshop. Once a year we gather together to celebrate this peculiar and wonderful enterprise called history and philosophy of science. We showcase exemplary work in HPS. We brainstorm about how to do it better, and try out new methodological ideas. We bring out productive tensions, and agonize and commiserate about the challenges involved in being historians and philosophers at once.

For those of you who have been to these workshops before, welcome back. For new participants, I hope and believe that this will be a highly rewarding and congenial occasion. The most important purpose of these workshops is to build a community of like-minded scholars. This year we have the largest-ever group, with 60 of us. If I remember my basic combinatorics, that means (60x59)/2 = 1770 pairwise meetings waiting to happen in the next two days. We may not realise all of those interactions, but please do take every opportunity to meet new people, as well as catching up with old friends and colleagues. In your conference pack you will find a full list of participants to facilitate interactions.

The integrated HPS workshops are hosted by a network of departments across the UK which share a programmatic commitment to practicing HPS as one enterprise, not as a mere juxtaposition of two disciplines. Currently this network consists of UCL, Leeds, Durham, Exeter, Aberdeen and Cambridge. Every year, the arrival of each departmental contingent at the workshop is a moving moment, at least for me. And we are also very pleased to welcome individual participants from various other institutions, this year including people from as far away as Beijing and Stanford. (I wish I could claim that they flew in just for this workshop – that would be a lie; nevertheless, welcome!)

These workshops began with a lament that Steven French and I shared over lunch one day in London 6 years ago, while I was teaching at UCL. Bemoaning the dearth of real connections between the history and the philosophy of science, we identified our own departments as the two places that still had a firm commitment to integrated HPS, and thought it would be nice to get our people together to discuss the current state and future of HPS. The first Leeds–UCL workshop on the future of HPS was held at UCL in June 2006, and it was a very successful little event. Soon Durham and Exeter joined the network, and more recently Cambridge and Aberdeen. We hope that the network will continue to expand.

I should also make a brief note about the international conference series that we inadvertently set off. When we planned the initial UCL–Leeds meeting, the BSPS readily gave us a small conference grant, but asked that we make the event open to others. So we advertised it on the standard listservs, and immediately had a very pleasant surprise of John Norton at Pittsburgh and Don Howard at Notre Dame saying what a good idea this was and that we should do an international version of the same thing. So was born the self-appointed International Committee for Integrated HPS, on which Steven and I and Michela Massimi have served from the start. We’ve now had three successful international conferences on Integrated HPS — at Pittsburgh in 2007, Notre Dame in 2009, and Indiana last year. The next one will be at the University of Athens in the spring of 2012 – please look out for that.

So we seem to be witnessing a worldwide revival of integrated HPS, and our little enterprise here has actually been at the centre of it all. And it is important to understand our enterprise in the context of longer-term trends. A mainstay of our meetings has been a nostalgic look at an earlier heyday of integrated HPS in the middle of the last century. These were the days of N. R. Hanson, Imre Lakatos, Gerd Buchdahl and Mary Hesse, the now-forgotten Herbert Dingle, and the up-and-coming Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Larry Laudan. Admirers of Lakatos and Hanson still fight over who first issued the classic slogan: “HS without PS is blind; PS without HS is empty.” These pioneers of integrated HPS saw philosophy of science as essential for the framing of history of science, and history of science as essential in providing empirical content for philosophy of science. Lakatos deserves credit for having issued the most sophisticated reflections on the nature of the relation between the two disciplines.

However, Lakatos and the like failed to carry the day in HPS. Instead, he became an emblem of the discord between the “H” and the “P”. Kuhn denounced Lakatosian rational reconstructions as “not history at all but philosophy fabricating examples”, and went further to declare that no one (including himself) could practice history of science and philosophy of science at the same time. Sociologists of scientific knowledge added their voice to this assault on philosophy, explicitly countering the Lakatosian internal–external distinction with their principles of impartiality and symmetry, and replacing epistemological justification with their principle of causality.

By the 1980s and the 1990s our field became full of disenchantment. Angry historians denounced the distortions and over-generalizations of history committed by philosophers, and delved into local histories cleansed of the universalising pretensions of philosophy. Meanwhile philosophers became bored by that sort of history to the point of irritation, and retreated to ever-more formalistic, abstract or technical work. Historians of science stopped worrying about philosophers, and became more concerned about proving their worth to general historians, and making friends with sociologists, anthropologists and literary critics. Meanwhile philosophers of science grew more comfortable in general philosophy departments. Even in many HPS departments and programmes, instead of active integration a resigned spirit of co-existence took hold; people began to talk of a marriage of convenience, a looming divorce, or being just friends.

But the tide seems to be turning again. The disintegration of HPS is seen by many as an alarming trend that must be reversed. What changed? This is not the time or the place to expound my personal view on why and how to do integrated HPS. I will only observe that the revival of interest in integrated HPS is a sign of maturity. We have learned to allow that philosophy is not the enemy of sociology, and that sociology without philosophy is not sufficient for framing our understanding of the nature and development of the content of science. Having recognized the importance of local history, we can still demand bigger pictures, and recognize that philosophy has a positive role to play in making meaningful narratives or analyses. Meanwhile there is growing disillusionment with the kind of philosophy of science that seems to take no heed of science itself. Philosophers of scientific practice are raising anew deep questions about the aims and methods of philosophy itself, moving beyond the kind of logic-chopping and esoteric disputation whose only ultimate purpose seems to be to prove how clever we are. There is an emerging awareness of the kind of critical self-understanding that a joined-up history and philosophy of science can give to our modern and post-modern civilization, which neither history nor philosophy alone can provide.

After several years of various thematic debates in this series of workshops, we have settled on a back-to-basics programme this year. What are the fundamental aims and methods of HPS? What are the obstacles in practicing it as an integrated discipline? And how do we teach it?

Before we delve into the splendid programme ahead, let me close by giving thanks to various people, all too briefly. I’d like to thank all the hosting departments and the chief coordinators in each department. We should all thank the BSPS, the BSHS, and (I hope) the Mind Association, for additional financial support. Here at Cambridge, I’d like to thank all my colleagues for agreeing to have this year’s workshop here and underwriting it financially, and Tim Lewens as my co-organizer. Nothing happens here without the expert work of our departmental administrator Tamara Hug and her excellent staff. And we would have hardly anything in place today without the able assistance of Katy Barrett; Katy, with the special coloured name tag, is a PhD student here, whom we have recruited as a special assistant for this workshop. [followed by various ‘housekeeping’ announcements]

I do hope that you will enjoy the next two days. Now I hand over to my good friend and esteemed colleague Michela Massimi from University College London, who will chair the first session. Thank you, and once again, a very warm welcome to everyone.