Joseph Agassi’s Critical Historiography of Science

Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (1):49-59 (2023)
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Abstract

In Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) and in other related works spanning over his entire career, Agassi presents his wide-ranging and original understanding of the history of science. It emerges from the criticism of two distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism (scientific theories emerge from facts), and conventionalism (scientific theories are mathematical frameworks for classifying facts). Both produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions, in which errors are either concealed or condemned. Popper’s philosophy, by contrast, allows for a picture in which science grows from the recognition and criticism of our best and wisest errors.

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The place of metaphysics in the historiography of science.Joseph Agassi - 1996 - Foundations of Physics 26 (4):483-499.
Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Science.Joseph Agassi - 1973 - Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (4):609.
Rationalizing the Historiography of Science.Joseph Agassi - 2007 - Nuova Civiltà Delle Macchine 25 (2).

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