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Elsevier

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Volume 89, October 2021, Pages 63-73
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

The tragedy of the canon; or, path dependence in the history and
philosophy of science

Author links open overlay panelAgnes Bolinska ^a, Joseph D. Martin ^b
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Abstract

We have previously argued that historical cases must be rendered
canonical before they can plausibly serve as evidence for
philosophical claims, where canonicity is established through a
process of negotiation among historians and philosophers of science
(Bolinska and Martin, 2020). Here, we extend this proposal by
exploring how that negotiation might take place in practice. The
working stock of historical examples that philosophers tend to employ
has long been established informally, and, as a result, somewhat
haphazardly. The composition of the historical canon of philosophy of
science is therefore path dependent, and cases often become stock
examples for reasons tangential to their appropriateness for the
purposes at hand. We show how the lack of rigor around the
canonization of case studies has muddied the waters in selected
philosophical debates. This, in turn, lays the groundwork for
proposing ways in which they can be improved.

Introduction

Philosophy of science assumes as its object of inquiry the entire
edifice of human efforts to acquire and systematize natural
knowledge. However, to the extent that they confront the actual
practice of science, philosophers address themselves to only a sliver
of all that occurs or has occurred under that umbrella. The
legitimacy of philosophy of science as an empirical endeavor with
aspirations to even local generality therefore requires that the
minority of scientific activity it addresses is more representative,
more influential, or otherwise more important than the vast majority
it neglects (Mizrahi, 2015).

Many critics question whether the empirical foundation philosophers
of science often use--composed of historical case studies--in fact
exhibits these virtues. The latitude philosophers have when
assembling, selecting, interpreting, and deploying their case
studies, the worry goes, encourages them to develop examples that
appear to support focused philosophical objectives, but which are
riddled with bias that undermines their generality, and which might
subvert their narrower aims as well. These challenges have drawn
attention from those defending the utility of history for philosophy
of science (e.g., Burian, 2001; Chang, 2012; Sauer and Scholl, 2016;
Schickore, 2011; Mizrahi, 2020; Schindler & Scholl, 2020) as well as
those advancing more skeptical accounts of the use of empirical,
especially historical, cases to evidence normative philosophical
claims (e.g., Chakravartty, 2017; Giere, 1973; Kinzel, 2015a; Pitt,
2001; Tambolo, 2018).

In response to these issues, we have argued that historical cases can
plausibly serve as evidence for philosophical claims once they are
rendered canonical, where canonicity is established through iterative
negotiation among historians and philosophers of science (Bolinska &
Martin, 2020). Cases can be canonical with respect to a philosophical
aim if, through that negotiation, they are shown to be sensitive to
the right kinds of causal factors. A canonical case for questions
about evidence and theory choice, for instance, should be one where
careful historical scrutiny shows that scientists adopted theories
for evidential reasons, rather than, say, ideological ones.
Philosophical discourse often proceeds alongside revision and
refinement of such cases.

Understanding case studies in terms of canonicity highlights a
further question that has received little attention: how has the
existing stock of canonical--or at least well-developed--cases been
assembled?^1 We address this question by exploring the path
dependencies that shape how historical cases become canonical for
given philosophical aims, and by suggesting principles to guide more
effective canonization practices. We first review the stakes of
canonicity for recent discussions of how to integrate history and
philosophy of science (HPS), aligning ourselves with those who
advocate iterative exchange within HPS. In section 3, we show how
such iteration has in fact occurred productively in the past. The
canon resulting from such informal iteration has nevertheless been
assembled haphazardly. In section 4, we assess what we call the
tragedy of the canon: the difficulties that emerge at the level of
communal aims when we have a stock of well-developed case studies
crafted to serve individual aims. In section 5, we enumerate key
aspects of canonization, showing how attending to these aspects can
help alleviate some of the unintended consequences of informal and
haphazard canonization practices. In section 6, we close with some
reflections on what our assessment implies for the professional labor
of HPS scholars.

Section snippets

Canonicity and HPS

Exploring how canonicity functions within HPS contributes to larger
discussions of the relationship between history of science and
philosophy of science. These began in the Anglophone world when
historicist philosophers like Thomas Kuhn and Norwood Russell Hanson
brought the two perspectives together in the 1960s and it has evolved
in response to shifting trends in HPS. Jutta Schickore (2018) traces
thinking about the relationship between history of science and
philosophy of science from these

Iteration in action

Theoretical prediction of a novel empirical phenomenon seems like a
great triumph, especially if that phenomenon is unexpected. The
prediction that the shadow of a rigid disc would show a bright spot
at its center, so the story goes, was a triumph for the wave theory
of light, integral to its acceptance in the mid-nineteenth century.
But does this imply that we should accord more epistemic weight to a
theory that successfully predicts novel empirical phenomena than to
one that merely

The tragedy of the canon

The negotiation between historians and philosophers results in a case
becoming canonical in one sense. But we must distinguish three
distinct senses of the terms "canonical" and "canon." These terms
commonly refer to works belonging to an established corpus--for
instance in literature--on one hand, and to works that are
authoritative or accurate on the other. In line with this
distinction, we can refer to the set of all the cases that have, in
practice, been used (to a non-trivial extent) to

Balancing the aspects of canonical case construction

The challenges described above concern the relationship between the
features of case studies themselves and the philosophical purposes to
which we put them. With that in mind, what aspects of that
relationship should we consider when deploying case studies? How
should a canon be assembled so that it reflects the collective
consequences of the types of cases that compose it? How, that is,
should historians and philosophers of science address the tragedy of
the canon? Below, we outline some

Coda: Affirmative action for case studies

For Garrett Hardin, who popularized the phrase, the tragedy of the
commons was tragic insofar as it recalled Alfred North Whitehead's
characterization of the theatrical genre: "The essence of dramatic
tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the
remorseless working of things" (Whitehead, 1926, p. 13; quoted in
Hardin, 1968, p. 1244). Fittingly, for our purposes, Whitehead wrote
this in the course of describing his attendance at the meeting of the
Royal Society at which

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