PHGA 6556 Historicity and Scientific Rationality 
Professor Dominic Balestra
Spring 2008
Tuesday, 2:30 – 4:30 pm

This course will be organized around Kuhn's challenge to scientific rationality and its value-neutral status.  More than any other work in the philosophy of science Thomas Kuhn's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, effectively presented the central challenge for any adequate account of scientific rationality, as that of accommodating something like truth, realism and history in science.  Moreover, the various responses to Kuhn have exposed fundamental critiques of the longstanding ideal of an ahistorical, value-neutral scientific rationality. The latter opens up the question of whether the epistemic values intrinsic to science remain apart from its historical situatedness and other extrinsic social-political dimensions. Thus, the post-Kuhn challenge in philosophy of science may be set out as an initial question concerning the rationality of science, that then generates a fundamental question of history, science and rationality. 

 W. Newton-Smith's The Rationality of Science provides an excellent formulation of the problem, and a selective,  critical reading of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend, and the author’s own response.  The first half of the course will be organized around Newton-Smith's treatment of the first wave in the Kuhn-Popper debate, and then we shall consider recent works by Philip Kitcher and Bas Van Fraassen in light of the above developments and inasmuch as they (Kitcher and Van Fraassen) extend the response to the Kuhnian challenge in its value-laden dimensions.

Course Texts:

T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (U of Chicago, 1970) 2nd Ed or 3rd Ed.
I. Lakatos and A. Musgrav
W. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (Routledge, 1981)

Course Requirements:

Course readings and class participation (includes leading one class discussion of a scheduled reading)
Short paper (5-6 pp.): critical discussion of a major theme in Kuhn’s SSR vis a vis Newton-Smith. 
Term paper on a topic developed in the course.