SHPS A - 88 2021, Sciortino; Hesketh;

 Luca Sciortino, The emergence of objectivity: Fleck, Foucault, Kuhn and Hacking, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Volume 88, 2021, Pages 128-137, ISSN 0039-3681, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.06.005.

• Fleck: 1935. Thought style. um mod de pensar de uma comunidade de produção de conhecimento. Rejeitaa a história fora do tempo dos positivistas lógicos (se aproxima de Bachelard e Canguillhem na escola da epistemologia histórica (estudo histórico do conhecimento [ver nota 1])).
• Kuhn: 1962. Paradigma como uma estrutura com exemplars, suposições ontológicas e valores
• Foucault: 1966. Episteme. Enfatiza as estruturas comuns às práticas históricas do período.
• Hacking 2002. Scientific styles of reaseoning (baseado em Crombie). Cada estilo envovle novos tipós de onjetos, parões de evidência, leis e frase verdadeiras ou falsas, além de ser auto-autenticador. Não só modos de pensar, mas de fazer. Metaepistemologia histórica, estudo histórico-ontológico da organização dos conceitos (que Daston chama de epistemologia histórica).

• Comparações entre esses conceitos são comuns.
• Objetividade: Douglas (2004, p. 4) has argued that there are ‘different types of processes we can examine in practice when determining whether to describe the product of that process as objective’. We can focus on: 1) ‘processes where humans attempt to interact with the world’; 2) ‘an individual's thought processes'; and 3) ‘the process used to reach an agreement’ (2004, p. 4). Once we focus on a particular kind of process, there are multiple senses of objectivity. In case 3), the outcome of a process can be considered objective in three senses: when ‘the same outcome is always produced, regardless of who is performing the process’ (‘procedural objectivity’); when the members of a community agree on the outcome (‘concordant objectivity’); and when they have ‘argued with each other to ferret out the sources of their disagreements’, in particular, when scientific data, theories, methods, etc. have been shared or discussed (‘interactive objectivity’) (Douglas, 2004, pp. 12–15).  2-3

• Os 4 pensadores explicam a objetividade no sentido interativo e concordante, como a comunidade entre em consenso sobre o que é verdadeiro ou falso. Todos são respostas a Kant de diferentes maneiras.
• In Section one, I had pointed out the difficulties in pinpointing the common objectives of Fleck, Kuhn, Foucault and Hacking within a historical approach to the study of scientific knowledge. Now we can notice that their projects can be viewed as studies of an organising concept (objectivity) and therefore fall into a field of research that today is called historical epistemology (‘historical meta-epistemology’ in Hacking's terminology). Indeed, objectivity shapes our practices of knowledge and is an essential organising principle of our investigations. Moreover, as we have seen, shedding light on how objectivity is possible is the necessary goal of their common program of research – that of historicising Kant's apriori. In this connection, we can notice that historicised Kantianism has been crucial to the formation of French historical epistemology (see Chimisso, 2008). 4 

Fleck

• n. Facts emerge from a ternary and always changing relation between the knower, the object to be known and a ‘missing component’ (Fleck, 1979 [1935], p. 38), the ‘thought style’ 4
• Thought style é dependente da comunidade, ou thought collective. O fato se forma comunitáriamente.
• Diferente de Foucault e Hacking não evocava leis gerais de discurso ou formas de pensar de cada período. Seus thoughts styles eram resultados de diferentes comunidades científicas. Dava foco na continuidade da passagem do conhecimento entre as gerações. Cada passagem levando a pequenas modificações e/ou "metilações" dos termos. Era, portanto, sociológico.

Foucault

• To summarise, Foucault's aim stated in the first passage is that of studying how objectivity is possible and the concept of episteme is the framework introduced for achieving it. The citation of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) that ‘the human face, from afar, emulates the sky’ (Foucault, 1994 [1966], p. 19) is one of the many examples of propositions that were candidates for being true-or-false only in the episteme of the Renaissance. 4
• Menos sociológico, mais discursivo. Existencia de leis que restrinem o pensamento das pessoas em cada época. Descontinuista.
• Dentro dos limites de narrativa explanatória, Foucault era um internalista enquanto Fleck era externalista.

Kuhn

• For Kuhn, it is a given paradigm that ‘yields generally agreed upon (although perhaps only tacit) rules definitive or constitutive of what counts as a “valid” or “correct” solution to a problem’ (Friedman, 2001, p. 42). This is a form of concordant objectivity in that, within a paradigm, scientists agree on the solutions to a problem and on the reliability of certain methods. And it is also a form of interactive objectivity because the emergence of a paradigm makes it possible that certain problems, methods or exemplars are shared and considered important 3
• Diferente de Kant, mas igual a Hacking, Kuhn defendia a contingência e a historicidade da objetividade. Isso ocorre também por objetividade interativa e concordante.
• Sociológico, foca na estrutura das comnidades em vez da reconstrução do conhecimento, considerado como um pioneiro da "social epistemology of science".
• Assim como Fleck descartava leis gerais de discurso, focando na comunidade, mas problematizava o termo: , scientific communities may exist at different levels - for example, there is the general scientific community of physicists and then, at lower levels, the specialties and sub-specialties communities. This means that changes affecting a community at the lower level may not affect the community at large (see Politi, 2018). Nevertheless, as Mo€βner (2011) noted, the influence of social factors is more widespread in Fleck: whereas the latter applies the framework of thought style even to non-scientific areas, Kuhn is reluctant to extend that of paradigm out of the hard sciences, not to mention to ordinary life. Consequently, unlike Kuhn's, Fleck's framework is potentially suited to including factors outside the scientific realm in the study of objectivity. 5
• Descontinuista. Objetividade como resultado das revoluções. Incomensurabilidade resultado de fleck em conjunção com ideias linguísticas, sociológicas e psicológicas. Se via como internalista.

Hacking

• 'Whether or not a proposition is as it were up for grabs, as a candidate for being true-or-false, depends on whether we have a way to reason about it (Hacking 2002, p. 160) 3.
• Algumas afirmações são style-dependent, são sentenças positivas (denotam a possibilidade de estarem a aptas a serem julgadas como verdadeiras ou falsas) e objetivas no sentido que são discutidas por uma comunidade que concorda epistemológicamente e metodologicamente. Quando provada verdadeira ou falsa a afirmação torna se "bivalente".
• . Like Foucault, Hacking believed that concepts, sentences and theories form a superstructure that is made possible by a deeper structure, a ‘depth knowledge’ (Hacking, 2002, p. 77) of which we are unaware. Whereas Foucault used the framework of episteme to capture this idea of ‘depth knowledge’, Hacking employed that of style of reasoning, whose emergence can make certain propositions objective. 6
• Descontinuista, cristalizações, formas nas quais a objetivdade se torna possível. Há incomensurabilidade (embora use outros termos) entre essas cristalizações ou styles of reasoning.
• In Kuhn's version of incommensurability, a semantic aspect can be recognized: two paradigms are incommensurable when there is no neutral language into which the content of both theories can be translated. In this sense, a lack of a ‘common measure’ translates into a lack of a ‘common language’. On the other hand, Hacking's claims do not lead to semantic incommensurability. His point is that there are sentences that are meaningful in some styles (e.g. because there are methods to assess their truth) and meaningless in other styles – the meaning of sentences does not change from one style to another. 8
• . Indeed, styles have sharp beginnings (discontinuity) and are at the core of the inquiry into what makes new propositions objective (archaeology). Whereas thought styles emerge from communicative interactions, continuously mute and then die out in a brief timespan, styles of reasoning have sharp beginnings and persist for a long period – they are a matter of longue-dur
  ee. Furthermore, unlike Kuhn's paradigms, styles of reasoning do not replace one another. Once a style emerges, if necessary, it can be adopted together with other styles for solving a scientific problem. 7

• The process by which facts, concepts or sentences come into being as objective can be depicted by a diagram of layers (Fig. 2), the ‘layers of scientific objectivity’. Styles of reasoning and epistemes sit at the lowest layer of the diagram, paradigms and thought styles at the second layer and all the epistemological items which become objective sit at the highest level. Each layer represents conditions of possibility for the existence of the successive layer. The higher layer instantiates the lower layer. There will also be other layers of various contingent factors, of which the emergence of a new kind of evidence is only one, that make possible the level of styles of reasoning or epistemes. Ultimately, we could use the metaphor of the ‘machine of objectivity’, schematised in the Fig. 2: there is a bottom layer of contingent factors, which trigger the emergence of styles of reasoning or epistemes, which in turn trigger the emergence of paradigms or thought styles and lead to objectivity. Within the metaphor, ‘triggering’ stands for ‘making possible’ and not ‘causing’. Models in which lower layers make possible the higher ones are known as ‘stratigraphical metaphors’. James Elwick has shown how they have been used by several scholars in history and science studies and how they are useful for speculating on degrees of contingency. In particular, he has depicted ‘styles of reasoning as conditions of possibility – circumstances that are necessary for other phenomena to occur’ (Elwick, 2012, p. 619). On my part, I have used the stratigraphical model to depict the relations between four different frameworks and their respective roles in making possible the emergence of objectivity. 
• The fact that in the figure two frameworks lie in the same layer does not mean that they both will necessarily be applicable to any case study. For example, consider the layer of paradigms and thought styles. Kuhn's discontinuist explanatory expectations make it impossible to apply his framework to those cases in which objectivity is the product of a slow process of development of past ideas. On the other hand, any extended discussion of how objectivity emerges would necessarily have to include frameworks in lower layers, i.e. frameworks such as styles of reasoning and epistemes. 
• This is not the only reason why the framework of style of reasoning matters in the study of objectivity. As conceived by Hacking, it incorporates an explanation as to why the objectivity of certain concepts, objects, sentences or methods endures. Hacking claims that styles are ‘self-authenticating’. This term refers to the circularity induced by the following double claim: the truth of certain sentences is what we find by using a style; in turn, a style is a standard of objectivity because it gets at the truth. For example, regarding the statistical style he claims that the verification methods that make statistical sentences meaningful are themselves couched in terms of probability.5 This circulus in probando is for Hacking part of the explanation of the resilience of a given style of reasoning and, therefore, of all the sentences that it makes objective. Finally, the four frameworks I have discussed so far do not exhaust all the different possible explanatory perspectives from which to consider a given episode in which scientific objectivity emerges – there are as many frameworks as all the possible histories we can construct. 9

 

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Ian Hesketh, Narratives of Charles Darwin Down Under, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Volume 88, 2021, Pages 303-311, ISSN 0039-3681, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.06.007.

• Duas narrativas quanto a importância da Austrália na formação das ideias de Darwin.
• While professional historians of science have tended to favor contextual histories of science, there is a clear market for histories of science written in the mode of the former, often produced (but not only so) by journalists or scientist-historians. What this has meant is that the general public is often presented with a mythologized view of scientific discovery and development, one largely 303-4
• While Darwin's Beagle-conversion thesis, whether focused on the Gal
  apagos or Australia, is no longer taken seriously by professional Darwin scholars (see, e.g., Sulloway, 1982a; 1982b), it is one that remains popular beyond the history of science profession, and continues to be produced in recent narratives of Darwin in Australia that have appeared both in print and online. 304 
• Lucas, no final do século XIX, lamenta que Darwin não viu as maravilhas da Austrália e o critica por isso anacronicamente. No centenário de sua estadia as comemorações foram mais positivas. Vários trabalhos recentes, baseando-se em de Beer e Barlow, interpretam a austrália como local onde Darwin se tornou transmutacionista. Rather than reading Darwin's observation [no diário] as a defence of natural theology, our authors read into the diary quotation a near confession of Darwin's emerging transmutationism 307
• Ironically, these historical narratives that sought to make Australia more central to Darwin's evolutionary conversion emerged at a time when a very different view about the relationship between Darwin's Beagle voyage and the development of his evolutionary views was being established within the general area of Darwin studies. As early as 1959, Gertrude Himmelfarb cast serious doubt on the evidence for Darwin's evolutionary conversion on the Beagle voyage. Indeed, Himmelfarb argued that “[t]here is, in fact, no real continuity between the Beagle and the Origin.” The only evidence for such continuity, according to Himmelfarb, was Darwin's own recollections of his experiences on the voyage that were then “re-ordered and re-interpreted by Darwin until they were ready to stand witness to the idea [of evolution]. Later they became so firmly identified in his mind with his theory, indeed were made to occupy pride of place in the genesis of that theory, that he could not think of them apart from it.” Given that subsequent generations only learned about the events of the Beagle and their connection to Darwin's theory of evolution “through Darwin's reconstruction of them,” historians have been essentially “hypnotized … into believing that the antecedents of an event must be the cause of that event.” This was the reason why historians had perpetuated the “the myth that the Origin was the Beagle writ large” (Himmelfarb, 1959, p. 123). For Himmelfarb, therefore, the real work in establishing this myth was provided by Darwin's own reconstruction of his discovery; the scraps of information gleaned from the Journal of Researches and his Beagle diary merely worked to add further confirmation to an already accepted narrative 307
• Sulloway seguiu o racioncínio acima nos 80s e foi replicado por Desmond & Moore e Browne.
• In regard to Darwin's observation about Australian marsupials, it was clear to Desmond and Moore that Darwin rejected the notion of multiple creations believing instead that “it was the most telling proof of a single Creative hand at work over the globe.” Rather than suddenly becoming a transmutationist, Darwin “had argued [William] Paley's classic case, from one perfect design to one perfect Designer” (Desmond & Moore, 1991, p. 178). This is precisely the opposite of the conclusion drawn by the Nicholases and others. For Browne, what Darwin's reflection in Australia showed was that he “was edging towards the kind of questions which ultimately led him to evolution” (Browne, 1995, p. 315). But he was only “edging towards” asking the questions because “[h]is natural history investigations were then and for several years afterwards rooted in the same natural theological traditions that he and other Victorians eventually overturned” (Browne, 1995, p. 322). What is significant about Darwin's famous diary quotation, therefore, is not that it indicated that Darwin had somehow suddenly become a transmutationist, but rather that his observations about species were still framed within a discourse of natural theology. 307
• Efeito sobel na popularização da história da ciencia. Quando a lende se torna fato, publique-se a lenda. Ele cita o livro do ornitorrinco de Moyal :(, além de um outro de McCalman por suas metáforas militares e outros problemas.
• What is perhaps most relevant about these recent narratives of Darwin Down Under is that they have helped to popularize a simplistic and romantic view of scientific development, while also giving voice to a highly problematic understanding of the place of Australia in Darwin's evolutionary theorizing. They are seemingly authoritative, however, because they rely on Darwin's own Beagle diary as well as a set of secondary scholarship that interprets that diary in one particular direction, even with regard to highly speculative claims about Darwin's true intentions. These sources form a feedback loop whereby the speculations of one become the very evidence for those speculations in another, thereby strengthening the overall case for Australia's significant place in the story of Darwin's evolutionary conversion. 309
• O legado de mais importnate segundo Hasketh sãoa s observações duramente racistas de Darwin sobre os aborígenes australianos.

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