Kitcher on Advancing Science

Kitcher attempts to stake out a middle ground between two extremes. On one side, logical empiricism and a broader took it for granted that every scientist is a rational agent, having all available information in mind, and making scientific decisions in terms of those reasons alone, so that science always changes for the right reasons. These mistaken claims missed the extent to which changes in the history of science have not been based on logic; they ignored social and psychological factors as wholly irrelevant to the problems of the analysis of the purely scientific. At the other extreme are those who maintain that everything about science is shaped by social factors, omitting such old-fashioned philosophical virtues as objectivity, realism, and progress. For example, in Kitcher's view, they miss the fact that the inability of a new scientific approach to solve all problems may be only temporary and not permanent indications of underdetermination, the problems being solvable only after considerable further work. By merging the best of both approaches while avoiding the excesses of each-by recognizing that psychological and social factors enter into scientific processes, even though objective considerations can ultimately prevail-Kitcher claims that we can enjoy many oldfashioned philosophical virtues without abandoning important recent insights from sociologicallyand psychologically-minded writers. (127). It is not clear precisely what his middle ground is. He could be seen as maintaining a strong thesis, that, being inextricably involved with psychological and social factors, philosophical issues cannot be separated out and dealt with independently; it is necessary to include psychological and social factors. But on the other hand, he might be taken as advocating a weak thesis, that it is merely advisable to include them: though they can be ignored, we do so at the risk of committing the same sorts of errors as Legend and logical empiricism. On either interpretation-whatever his view of the possibility of considering the philosophy-of-science issues separately-Kitcher clearly rejects the idea that it is necessary to analyze some alleged purely scientific aspects independently of the psychological and social aspects of science and scientific change before proceeding to the inclusion of those aspects

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