Contingency Is Here to Stay—in Science as in Any Other Human Enterprise
Léna Soler
2025
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
Blacksburg, VA
Université de Lorraine
Archives Henri-Poincaré – Philosophie et REcherches sur les Sciences et les Technologies (PREST), Nancy, France
📄 Contingency Is Here to Stay—in Science as in Any Other Human Enterprise, Léna Soler (PDF 1.5 MB)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
❧ 1.1 A Stimulating Philosophical Dialogue about the Inevitability or the Contingency of Scientific Achievements
❧ 1.2 The Inevitabilist / Contingentist Debate Recently Introduced in Philosophy of Science
❧ 1.3 Background and Basic Principles of My Contingentist Arguments
• 1.3.1 A Case Study in Quantum Physics to Substantiate a Contingentist View: The N/B-QP Case
2. A Systematic Reconstruction of Perović’s Inevitabilist View
❧ 2.1 The Indispensable Roles of Counterfactual History in the Philosophy of Science
• 2.1.1 Main Functions and Potential Value of Counterfactual History
• 2.1.2 Methodological Necessary Conditions for the Counterfactual Program to be Truly Instructive
❧ 2.2 Lessons from Counterfactual History: An Inevitabilist View of Science
• 2.2.1 Plasticity, Sinuosity and Contingency in the Short Run
• 2.2.2 Continuity and Inevitability in the Long Run
• 2.2.3 The Inevitability of What?
❧ 2.3 A Rarely Instantiated Strong Variety of Convergent and Teleological Inevitabilism
• 3.1.1 What Source of Inevitability? The Need to Disentangle Inevitabilist and Realist Arguments
• 3.1.2 From “Non Entirely Arbitrary” Achievements of Our Science, to Inevitable Achievements of Any Science: How to Fill the Gap?
❧ 3.2. Does the Actual History of Science Converge?
• 3.2.1 Perović’s Contention that the Actual History of Science Converges
• 3.2.2 The Ostracizing Strategy of Disputing the Scientific Status
• 3.2.3 The Non-Ostracizing Strategy of Diagnosing Invalid Scientific Achievements
• 3.2.4 The Strategy of the Reduction of the Otherness
• 3.2.5 The Convergentist Version of the Strategy of the Appeal to the Long Run
• 3.2.6 Assessing the Appeal-to-the-Long-Run Strategy: A Weak Inevitabilist Strategy Based on an Optimistic Induction
• 3.2.7 The Monist Regime of our Science and the Empirical Possibility of an Alternative, More Pluralist Regime
• 3.2.8 The Optimistic Induction that Our Science will Inevitably Converge in the Long Run: A Reassessment in the Light of the Monist Regime of Our Science
• 3.3.1 A First Argument Against the Convergence of All Possible Virtual Histories on the Same Scientific Achievements
• 3.3.2 The Issue of Normative Incompatibilities between Several Empirically Possible Scientific Trajectories
• 3.3.3 The Indispensability of Endorsing the View from Inside When Reflecting on the Determinants of Scientific Development
• 3.3.4 The Influence of Science Education: Decisive and Inevitable
• 3.3.5 Can Students Learn to Use Orthodox Quantum Formalism Without Incorporating a Subsequently Influential Physical “Interpretation”?
• 3.3.6 Taking the Full Measure of the Big Difference that Science Education Can Make: Illustration of the N/B-QP Case
• 3.3.7 The Type of Argument that Perović Should Provide in Support of the Inevitable Convergence of All Counterfactual (Monist) Scientific Trajectories
• 3.3.8 Perović’s Suggestion: Co-Evolution as the Developmental Mechanism Responsible for the Convergence of Inevitable Scientific Achievements?
• 3.4.1. A Structural Characterization of the ‘Mechanisms’ at Work in the History of Science Assuming a Symbiotic Scheme of Scientific Advance
• 3.4.2 Principle of the Contingentist Structural Argument: A Generalized Duhem-Quine Rationale Implying a Permanent Plasticity
• 3.4.3 The Powerlessness of the “Joints of Nature” in the Framework of a Symbiotic Scheme of Scientific Development Involving Self-Vindicated Systems
• 3.5.1 The Inevitabilist Objection and the General Principle of Its Contingentist Rebuttal
• 3.5.2 Conservatism Versus Simplicity: A First Source of Perceived Constraints
• 3.5.3 Coherence, Systemic Interconnexions, and the Inevitable Propagation of any Modification Locally Introduced in a Scientific Symbiosis: A Source of Constraints Easily Perceived as External and Inevitable
• 3.5.4 Neurath’s Boat Principle, Path Dependence, Inevitable Continuities in the Short Run, Dramatic Discontinuities Only in the Long Run
• 3.6.1. A Quasi-Pavlovian Inevitabilist Reaction to Contingentist Claims about Science: The PUSU Demand Turned into an Allegedly Decisive Argument Against Contingentism
• 3.6.2 The PUSU Alleged Argument Collapses When the Monist Regime of Our Science is Taken Into Account
• 3.6.3. The PUSU Challenge Turned Into an Argument in Support of Contingentism
• 3.6.4 To Conclude on the PUSU Reaction to Contingentist Claims
❧ 3.7 Discussing a Recent Instructive Instance of PUSU Challenge: A Dialogue with Carl Hoefer
• 3.7.1 An Implicit Inevitabilism Encapsulated in an Explicit Scientific Realism
• 3.7.2 Hoefer’s PUSU Challenge
• 3.7.3 Blindness to the Impacts of the Monist Regime of Our Science
• 3.7.4 Why Hoefer’s PUSU Challenge is Impossible to Meet within the Monist Regime of Our Science
• 3.7.5 When the Impossible Becomes Possible: How Hoefer’s PUSU Challenge Could be Met in a Pluralist Scientific Regime
❧ 4.1 Contingency of Scientific Achievements: Due to Inevitable Features of Human Knowledge Acquisition?
❧ 4.2 Should We Worry about the Contingency of Scientific Achievements?
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