Article ID: CBB634106059

French Neopositivism and the Logic, Psychology, and Sociology of Scientific Discovery (2021)

unapi

This article is concerned with one of the notable but forgotten research strands that developed out of French nineteenth-century positivism, a strand that turned attention to the study of scientific discovery and was actively pursued by French epistemologists around the turn of the nineteenth century. I first sketch the context in which this research program emerged. I show that the program was a natural offshoot of French neopositivism; the latter was a current of twentieth-century thought that, even if implicitly, challenged the positivism of first-generation positivists such as Comte. I then survey what French epistemologists—including Ernest Naville, Élie Rabier, Pierre Duhem, Édouard Le Roy, Abel Rey, André Lalande, Théodule-Armand Ribot, Edmond Goblot, and Jacques Picard, among others—had to say about the logic, psychology, and sociology of discovery. My story demonstrates the inaccuracy of existing historical accounts of the philosophical study of scientific discovery.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB634106059/

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Authors & Contributors
Fortino, Mirella
Lando, Fabio
Adrien Vila Valls
Nekrašas, Evaldas
Calemi, Francesco
M. Anthony Mills
Concepts
Philosophy of science
Positivism
Epistemology
Philosophy
Historiography
Philosophers of science, modern
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
France
Europe
Germany
Czech Republic
Institutions
Collège de France, Paris
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