Disagreement in Science in Historical Context

Seidel, Markus

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the role considerations about the history of science play in philosophical debates about disagreement in science. First, the chapter shortly reflects on the relationship between history and philosophy of science. Second, the chapter focuses on figuring out the impact of Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s much discussed claims about incommensurability on the question of disagreement. It is shown that incommensurability introduces a plethora of potential issues of disagreement in science. The chapter closes by some remarks about using examples from the history of science in the debate about scientific realism: the same cases of disagreement in the history of science can be interpreted in a realist or anti-realist way.