Philosophy of science and its discontents / Steve Fuller.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 218-235) and index.

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. My Map of the Field -- 1. Overall Trend: From Historicism to Naturalism -- 2. The Great Pretender: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge -- 3. The Old Chestnuts: Rationalism and Realism -- 4. The Growth Areas: Biology and Cognitive Science -- 5. An Itinerary for the Nineties: Does Science Compute? -- 6. The New Wave: Metascience -- 7. Feminism: The Final Frontier? -- 2. Mythical Naturalism and Anemic Normativism: A Look at the Status Quo -- 1. The Mythical Status of the Internal History of Science, or Why the Philosophy of Science Is Suffering an Identity Crisis -- 2. Dismantling This Myth, Step By Step -- 3. Gently Easing Ourselves Out of Internalism: The Case of Disciplines -- 4. If Internalism Is Such a Myth, Then Why Don't the Sociologists Have the Upper Hand? -- 5. Still, the Internalists Do Not Have a Lock on the Concept of Rationality -- 6. Nor on the Concept of Reality, Where Things Are a Complete Mess -- 7. The End of Realism, or Deconstructing Everything In and Out of Sight -- 8. But What's Left of Scientific Rationality? Only Your Management Scientist Knows For Sure -- 9. Finale: Some New Things For Philosophers to Worry About -- 3. Reposing the Naturalistic Question: What Is Knowledge? -- 1. Naturalism as a Threat to Rationality: The Case of Laudan -- 2. Shards of a Potted History of Naturalism -- 3. Why Today's Naturalistic Philosophy of Science Is Modeled More on Aristotle Than on Darwin -- 4. Why a Truly Naturalistic Science of Science Might Just Do Away With Science -- 5. A Parting Shot at Misguided Naturalism: Piecemeal Approaches to Scientific Change -- 6. Towards a New Dismal Science of Science: A First Look at the Experimental Study of Scientific Reasoning -- 7. Sociologists versus Psychologists, and a Resolution via Social Epistemology -- 8. If People Are Irrational, Then Maybe Knowledge Needs to Be Beefed Up -- 9. Or Maybe Broken Down -- 10. Or Maybe We Need to Resort to Metaphors: Everyone Else Has -- 11. Could Reason Be Modeled on a Society Modeled on a Computer? -- 12. Could Computers Be the Very Stuff of Which Reason Is Made? -- 13. Yes, But There's Still Plenty of Room For People! -- 4. Reposing the Nonnative Question: What Ought Knowledge Be? -- 1. Knowledge Policy Requires That You Find Out Where the Reason Is in Knowledge Production -- 2. Unfortunately, On This Issue, Philosophers and Sociologists Are Most Wrong Where They Most Agree -- 3. However, Admitting the Full Extent of This Error Suggests a Radical Reworking of the History of Science -- 4. But It Also Means That the Epistemic Legitimacy of the Interpretive Method Has Been Undermined -- 5. Moreover, the Fall of the Interpretive Method Threatens the New Cognitive History of Science -- 6. Still, None of This Need Endanger the Rationality of Science, If We Look in Other Directions -- 7. Reconstructing Rationality I: Getting History Into Gear -- 8. Reconstructing Rationality II: Experiment Against the Infidels -- 9. The Perils and Possibilities of Modeling Norms: Some Lessons from the History of Economics -- 10. The Big Problem: How To Take the First Step Toward Improving Science? -- 11. Behaviorally Speaking, the Options Are Numerous But Disparate -- 12. If the Display of Norms Is So Disparate, Then the Search For Cognitive Coherence is Just So Much Voodoo -- Coda: Epistemic Autonomy as Institutionalized Self-Deception -- Postscript: Big Questions and Little Answers - A Response to Critics -- Bibliography -- Index.

"The most important and exciting recent development in the philosophy of science is its merging with the sociology of scientific knowledge. Here is the first text book to make this development available."--Publisher description.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.