Materialism and the History of Science

Abstract

While the links between history of science and materialist epistemology are widely discussed (and divergently interpreted), this chapter explores the relationships between history of science and ontology. Its main goal is to vindicate the coordination between constructivism and (critical) realism as one of the main open problems in current ontology. My proposal is thus a contribution to the current conversation in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), which I roughly review in the introduction. The first section attempts to gauge the philosophical import of the growing presence of “matter”, “materialism”, and “ontology” in history of science and related disciplines. Section 8.2 argues that, in order to enhance their philosophical productivity, discussions on matter and materiality ought to be accompanied by ontological discussion. Following Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous (non-reductive) materialism, I suggest that sciences result from bodily operations with chunks of the world which are pre-organized according to both ontological and historical scales. These operations include semantic and syntactic transformations that imply different degrees of continuity between objects and signs. What is specific to the sciences is that necessary relationships can emerge between signs in propositional theories which imply unforeseen relationships between objects. One of the main open problems in philosophy of science is to account for this objective necessity given science’s historically contextual and operational dimension. Although in a rather schematic form, I put this categories to work in an analysis of physical oceanography (this analysis also reveals ways in which the history of a science is relevant to science’s current structure). In the last section, I explain how the proposed operational notion of truth serves to reconstruct the distinction between natural and human sciences, but I also show the complexity and nuances of that distinction. Again through the example of oceanography, I show that the earth and environmental sciences have turned towards history in search for anthropogenic change.