Theodore Arabatzis

The aim of this article is to make a case for the pertinence of a biographical approach to the history of scientific objects. I first lay out the rationale of that approach by
revisiting and extending my earlier work on the topic. I consider the characteristics of scientific objects that motivate the biographical metaphor, and I indicate its virtues and limitations by bringing out the positive and negative analogies between biographies of scientific objects and ordinary biographies. I then point out various ways in which scientific objects may pass away and argue that their demise should be conceptualized as a process. Finally, I sketch the history of the concept of “ether” in nineteenth and early twentieth century physics and suggest that it lends itself particularly well to a biographical treatment. To that effect, I discuss the identity, heuristic character, and recalcitrance of the ether and examine the reasons that may have led to its passing.

Scientific concepts play representational and heuristic roles in the acquisition of scientific knowledge. On the one hand, they represent entities, properties, and processes in nature. On the other hand, they facilitate, or even make possible, the investigation of those entities, properties, and processes. Concepts are supposed to be things in the head: mental representations of objects, properties, process and so on. In that sense, they are theoretical constructs of cognitive psychology. They are posited to account for various abilities that humans have, such as the ability to unify and to discriminate. The public character of scientific concepts, such as ‘electron’, ‘field’, ‘gene’, and so on, as opposed to their private mental counterparts, makes it possible for historians and philosophers of science to study them by examining the evolving representations associated with them; their uses, that is, the objects, properties, and processes to which they are applied; and their relations to other concepts.

The author brings out the many faces of explanation in history of science by commenting on the contributions to a Focus section of Isis on historical explanation. The essay starts by indicating several ways in which the term “explanation” is used in historiographical discourse. It then distinguishes the object of explanation from the process of explanation and points out common themes and points of contention among the thirteen contributions. It also discusses two of those points in more detail: the problems of causal explanation in history of science and the imperative of avoiding anachronism in historical interpretation. The essay concludes by suggesting a pluralist take on explaining science historically.

I raise two challenges for scientific realists. The first is a pessimistic meta-induction (PMI), but not of the more common type, which focuses on rejected theories and abandoned entities. Rather, the PMI I have in mind departs from conceptual change, which is ubiquitous in science. Scientific concepts change over time, often to a degree that is difficult to square with the stability of their referents, a sine qua non for realists. The second challenge is to make sense of successful scientific practice that was centered on entities that have turned out to be fictitious.

In this article, I explore the value of philosophy of science for history of science. I start by introducing a distinction between two ways of integrating history and philosophy of science: historical philosophy of science (HPS) and philosophical history of science (PHS). I then offer a critical discussion of Imre Lakatos’s project to bring philosophy of science to bear on historical interpretation. I point out certain flaws in Lakatos’s project, which I consider indicative of what went wrong with PHS in the past. Finally, I put forward my own attempt to bring out the historiographical potential of philosophy of science. Starting from Norwood Russell Hanson’s insight that historical studies of science involve metascientific concepts, I argue that philosophical reflection on those concepts can be (and, indeed, has been) historiographically fruitful. I focus on four issues (epistemic values, experimentation, scientific discovery and conceptual change) and discuss their significance and utility for historiographical practice.

In this paper, we revisit the discovery of argon by Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay. We argue that to understand historically how argon was detected, conceptualized, and accommodated into chemical knowledge we need to take into account the philosophical insight that scientific discovery is often an extended process. One of argon’s most intriguing properties was that it did not react with other elements. Reactivity, however, had been a constitutive property of elements. Thus, the discovery of argon could not have been accepted by chemists without a reconceptualization of ‘element’. Furthermore, there were difficulties with the accommodation of argon in the Periodic table, because argon appeared to undermine the conception of matter that underlay the Periodic table. The discovery of argon was complete only after those conceptual difficulties had been removed. This is why it has to be understood as an extended process, rather than as an event. Furthermore, we will suggest that some of the factors that complicated the discovery of argon were related to the legitimization of physical techniques of investigation in chemistry and the emergence of physical chemistry.

The significant role of models and analogies in scientific practice has been widely recognized. Modern scholarship on analogy takes its departure from the work of Mary Hesse, who pointed out the existence of negative analogies between two different physical systems, that is, those respects in which the two systems clearly differ. However, she underappreciated the role of negative analogies in model-building. In our paper we will stress the significance of negative analogies for the development of Bohr’s atom. We will argue that it was the negative, rather than the positive, analogy between intra-atomic electrons and the rings of Saturn that motivated Bohr to adopt and develop Rutherford’s atomic model. The elaboration of the negative analogy led to the conclusion that the electron could move only in certain discrete orbits and its energy and angular momentum were accordingly restricted. Furthermore, a related analogy between electrons and planets played a significant role in Bohr’s subsequent articulation of the model. On the one hand, the positive analogy suggested that electrons (like planets) revolved around the center of mass of the atom (solar system). On the other hand, the extremely high speed of electrons (unlike that of planets) suggested that relativity be brought into the picture.

In this paper we take as our point of departure Kostas Gavroglu & Yorgos Goudaroulis’s insight that, in the process of describing and explaining novel phenomena, scientific concepts are taken “out of” their original theoretical context, acquire additional meaning, and become relatively autonomous. We first present their account of how concepts are re-contextualized and, in the process, extended and/or revised. We then situate it within its philosophical context, and discuss how it broke with a long-standing philosophical tradition about concepts. Finally, we argue that recent developments in science studies can flesh out and vindicate the “concepts out of contexts” idea. In particular, historical and philosophical studies of experimentation and cognitive-historical studies of modeling practices indicate various ways in which concepts are formed and articulated “out of context”.

In this paper (written in Greek) I discuss whether history of science supports a relativist outlook. First, I present critically various philosophical theses (the theory-ladenness of observation, incommensurability, the underdetermination of theory by evidence, and the Duhem-Quine thesis) that have been employed to support strong versions of relativism. Then, I argue for a prima facie paradoxical position, namely that history of science undermines the relativist implications of these theses. Third, I discuss various criteria of theory-choice and suggest that, sometimes, they do not suffice to determine uniquely the theory that should be adopted by the scientific community. Finally, I argue for a weaker version of “relativism”, i.e., for the position that an adequate reconstruction of the development of science has to take into account various historically contingent factors.

One of the major trends in the debate over the existence of the unobservable entities employed theoretically by science for the last 10 years or so (the so-called 'realism debate'), has been a realization that the matter can no longer be settled on basis of broad general statements about the reality or otherwise of entities hypothesised by successful theories, but must be judged independently on a case by case basis, with careful examination of the history of their theoretical representations. Theo Arabatzis' Representing Electrons is another step in this direction, 1 and for the realist, a positive one. While still committed to his largely agnostic viewpoint as far as this debate is concerned, Arabatzis thinks nonetheless that the electron's representation from 1897 to 1925 experienced sufficient permanence in the experimental setups assigned to it, to at least give us license to believe that scientists were referring to the same 'thing'. There are hints enough here that Arabatzis has a rather new theory of reference to put forward, centred on experimentation rather than theoretical descriptions. More of this however in a moment! Realism is only one item on the Arabatzis' list of considerations in this multifarious work, which is keen to find sure ground methodolo-gically before launching off on its main task, a history of the electron. He ranges thus over a large collection of historiographical and philosophical topics, all given application in case of the electron's representation. By way of challenge to the more popular viewpoint, he disputes that there could be said to be a singular discovery event as far as an unobservable entity is concerned. The electron itself was not so much discovered, as accepted through a combination of the work by Lorentz, Larmor and Thompson, all producing results which pointed to the same entity being involved in each of the differing experimental situations. Its broad applicability made the electron all but indispensable for the practice of physicists concerned with electromagnetic theory. This result was a rather rapid general acceptance of it. The chief consideration for Arabatzis however is the promotion of a new method for understanding the process by which the representation of an entity is developed and revised; one which takes its cue from the quite frequent lack of control any one scientist has over the direction a representation takes, and the sometimes active sense with which a representation resists being bent to any particular design. This almost animated nature ARTICLE IN PRESS 1 To quote him, ''the histories of scientific concepts can play a seminal role in evaluating the tenability of a realist attitude toward the corresponding entities'' (p. 258).

Successful prediction has been a central goal of the sciences. Furthermore, decisions regarding public policy rely heavily on the ability to predict. In this regard, the role of the sciences is crucial, since scientific knowledge is usually a prerequisite for successful prediction. However, the extraction of predictions from scientific knowledge involves several perils and complications. For instance, the making of predictions is never a direct deduction from the premises of a scientific theory. Rather, there is a considerable gap between high-level theory and predictions of particular phenomena, a gap that is bridged by modeling, idealizations, and approximations. This research project aims at improving our understanding of the perils of prediction from the perspective of history and philosophy of science (HPS), while integrating tools and insights from the history and philosophy of computing. It includes case studies in five areas: seismology, high energy physics, quantum chemistry, environmental science, and classical physics.