Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, we should not elide the differences between the Kantian strands running throughout this work. In this paper, I disentangle a few of these strands in the work of Reichenbach and Lewis focusing especially on their theories of relativized, constitutive a priori principles in empirical knowledge. In particular, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis concerning their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis's Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn's Kantianism than Reichenbach's, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practice-based approaches to the philosophy of science.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Ferrari, Massimo;
(2012)
Between Cassirer and Kuhn. Some Remarks on Friedman's Relativized A Priori
(/isis/citation/CBB001230568/)
Article
Atkinson, David;
Peijnenburg, Jeanne;
(2006)
Probability without Certainty: Foundationalism and the Lewis--Reichenbach Debate
(/isis/citation/CBB000740010/)
Chapter
Ryckman, T. A.;
(2003)
Two Roads from Kant: Cassirer, Reichenbach, and General Relativity
(/isis/citation/CBB001213684/)
Chapter
Nye, Mary Jo;
(2010)
Science and Politics in the Philosophy of Science: Popper, Kuhn, and Polanyi
(/isis/citation/CBB001023240/)
Book
Jarvie, I. C.;
Milford, Karl;
Miller, David;
(2006)
Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment
(/isis/citation/CBB001024573/)
Book
Wray, K. Brad;
(2011)
Kuhn's Evolutionary Social Epistemology
(/isis/citation/CBB001221165/)
Article
Rowbottom, Darrell P.;
(2011)
Kuhn Vs. Popper on Criticism and Dogmatism in Science: A Resolution at the Group Level
(/isis/citation/CBB001024146/)
Thesis
Hedfors, Eva;
(2006)
Reading Fleck: Questions on Philosophy and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001560981/)
Article
Richardson, Alan;
(2003)
The Geometry of Knowledge: Lewis, Becker, Carnap and the Formalization of Philosophy in the 1920s
(/isis/citation/CBB000340876/)
Article
Gordin, Michael D.;
Milam, Erika Lorraine;
(2012)
A Repository for More than Anecdote: Fifty Years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(/isis/citation/CBB001252330/)
Article
Lutz, Sebastian;
(2012)
On a Straw Man in the Philosophy of Science: A Defense of the Received View
(/isis/citation/CBB001232111/)
Essay Review
Ivan Ferreira da Cunha;
(2015)
Using History of Philosophy in Philosophy of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000647295/)
Article
Pinto de Oliveira, J. C.;
(2012)
Kuhn and the Genesis of the “New Historiography of Science”
(/isis/citation/CBB001230575/)
Essay Review
Janiak, Andrew;
(2011)
The Kantian Spirit: How to Resist Realism in the Philosophy of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001566746/)
Chapter
Schiemann, Gregor;
(2006)
Inductive Justification and Discovery. On Hans Reichenbach's Foundation of the Autonomy of the Philosophy of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001033916/)
Chapter
Richardson, Alan;
(2006)
Freedom in a Scientific Society: Reading the Context of Reichenbach's Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB001033917/)
Article
Stadler, Friedrich;
(2011)
The Road to Experience and Prediction from Within: Hans Reichenbach's Scientific Correspondence from Berlin to Istanbul
(/isis/citation/CBB001211470/)
Thesis
Mizrahi, Moti;
(2010)
What Is Scientific Progress?
(/isis/citation/CBB001567179/)
Article
Andrea Amato;
(2018)
Knowledge within Anxiety
(/isis/citation/CBB342878764/)
Article
Eberhardt, Frederick;
(2011)
Reliability via Synthetic a priori: Reichenbach's Doctoral Thesis on Probability
(/isis/citation/CBB001211469/)
Be the first to comment!