This essay is primarily meant for readers in other fields, especially the social sciences, who are interested in learning what work the now-popular concept of practice is doing in philosophy of science. I hope it is also useful for people, like me, who are interested in doing philosophy of science but struggle to make sense of the field’s methods and intellectual landscape. Alasdair MacIntyre's (1981, 175) definition of practice is still a good starting point: a practice is "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity."
The basic position I take is that philosophers of science have adapted practice as a way of generalizing symbolic logic to serve the same basic purpose it did for the discipline’s founding movement of logical empiricism. This purpose is to transform what people do through making various aspects of their activities explicit, which includes both description, normative critique, and revision. On these terms, we can see the advent of symbolic logic as a negotiated transformation of norms and behaviors in certain influential scientific and mathematical fields in the decades surrounding 1900. Practice provides a more general ground on which to both speak about the norms and behaviors of people participating in a cooperative activity and to speak as someone included in the activity. Talk of experimental, modeling, and field practices generalize the scope of subjects, internal goods, and standards of excellence open to philosophical consideration, but they do not qualitatively shift the basic framework.
Positioning practice in philosophy of science this way suggests there's a greater degree of historically continuity than one might expect between the current research landscape and its origins over a century ago. Certainly philosophers studying scientific practice have greatly expanded the field’s set of legitimate research topics beyond the theory-centric focus of logical empiricism. As I’ll argue, however, this has not brought about a radical change in how philosophers of science relate to scientists or other subfields of philosophy.
The claims I make here are likely to be controversial, and so this essay does not aim to state an authoritative consensus about philosophy of scientific practice, which I doubt exists in any case. My aim then is instead to advance reflection and criticism about what practice is doing for philosophers of science. There is a conversation that needs to happen about the terms of engagement that follow from studying practice and how we can open up the field even wider.
I see the trajectory of philosophy of science as an academic profession as united primarily through its continued ambition to find inventive ways of rejecting its founders, the logical empiricists. This makes it a tradition in the sense of Alistair MacIntyre, where the glue holding philosophy of science together as a shared endeavor is the passionate debate over its ultimate nature as a project. Indeed, one can trace MacIntyre's influence through one of the founders of philosophy of biology, Marjorie Grene, to influential leaders in the field such as Helen Longino. Grappling the field’s legacy is therefore worthwhile because it continues to exert a strong influence on what the discipline prizes as its most important problems and standards.
In particular, it's helpful to understand the positionality of logical empiricists in relation to scientific and societal matters of concern.
Philosophy as "queen" of the sciences, with a perceived responsibility for upholding shared ideals among the proliferating scientific disciplines in the late nineteenth century. However, philosophers took themselves to have standing in pursuing this goal that was distinct from any of the scientific disciplines in particular. The development of symbolic logic provided an appealing basis for this standing. In the decades surrounding 1900, physics and mathematics answering intersecting methodological problems in physics and mathematics.
In terms of worldview, also a rejection of shared conclusions about science, including the fundamentality of physics, the unity of science, and the existence of universal rationality.]
In making sense of philosophy of science’s ultimate continuity and conservatism, one also cannot overemphasize the constraints enforced by its institutional location within mainstream analytic philosophy departments in the U.S. and Britain. Analytic philosophy is notoriously impossible to define to everyone’s satisfaction (in part because philosophers derive such satisfaction from finding new ways to fundamentally disagree with everyone else). But a common thread, shared by early logical empiricism, is that our knowledge is already on secure footing despite our uncertainty about how and why. If we adopt this starting point, our philosophical project is then to uncover this already-grasped-but-still-obscure source of certainty through rendering it more formally explicit in language. Philosophers locate this source of our certainty in very different places; the logical empiricists first sought it in basic sense perceptions, while others looked to the axiomatic operations of symbolic logic or the linguistic mastery of a native speaker. It is still hard to reject this “quest for certainty” and still be recognized as doing professional philosophy.
What do philosophers of science mean by practice? There is a deep and unresolved debate among social theorists about the nature of practice, which is largely undiscussed (and I suspect) unknown by philosophers of science [Bourdieu, Goffman, ethnomethodology, Blumer]. This represents a path largely untaken for the field, a point I come back to in the conclusion. Instead, one can distinguish several flavors of what philosophers understand by practice based on the depth of implications that practice has for doing philosophy.
On the most basic but perhaps most common level, “paying attention to practice” means bringing more of scientists’ own resources into the toolkit philosophers use to interpret the results of scientific research. [models, experiments, laws.] Wittgenstein’s imperative to “go look!” is a handy summary.
Practice, on these terms, may be seen as one of several modest ways of rejuvenating the projects of analytic philosophy with new methodological approaches, similar to experimental philosophy. [greater continuity with the terms of science outside the narrow realms where conceptual analysis or argumentation using deductive logic or statistical theory is helpful]
Idea that the concept/nature of practice provides new foundations for old questions about justification, truth, realism, etc.
Here the distinction between what scientists do and what they take to be the right way of doing it is absolutely essential to how practice generalizes [Rouse]. The former describes an empirical pattern of behaviors without any assertion of right or wrong to those actions. It takes practice to be a matter of regularity. The latter gets involved in regulating what people do and makes norms about correct action inherent to a practice.
Also a shift to conceiving of science as a situated, processual, and social endeavor.
Where can you find the practice turn at work in contemporary philosophy of science? A major challenge here is that the increasing importance of practice has developed often without fanfare and in parallel across many specific topics within the field. [this is where generalization thesis proves a useful guide. Discuss how practice appears in its different guises as philosophers of science seek to maintain continuity of topics and aims while rejecting the methods and assumptions of logical empiricism.]
You can see it, for example, in the appeal to norms of explanation made by philosophers studying mechanisms as an alternative to Hempel’s classic deductive-nomological theory. See especially normal forms of problem solutions in Culp and Kitcher 1989.
It’s also surfaced in leading theories of interdisciplinary research. Attention to practice is invaluable as a path beyond anti-reductionism toward a positive understanding of how the sciences (and society) are related to each other. See especially problem agendas in Love 2008, Grantham 2004's discussion of unity as interconnection.
The interpersonal dimension of practice also makes it possible to state and investigate novel questions about science as a social endeavor. For example, see recent work on scientific repertoires. [Leonelli and Ankeny] and ill-structured problems/solutions in Herbert Simon, Susan Leigh Star.
I suggest that practice has the potential to generalize the role played by logic in the early days of professional philosophy of science. Captures the interest in normative considerations — knowledge as an achievement with respect to certain aims — but accommodates relativity to specific aims and contexts of particular groups of scientists. Understanding that norms of group practice are relative to a group of practitioners is not to endorse relativism, however, because it says nothing a priori about the existence of consensus across communities.
The classical pragmatist notion of inquiry provides an encompassing framework for tackling this question about the extent to which we do and should share an understanding of how science works.
The idea of inquiry also provides a basis for investigating the conditions under which practice does and should become formalized, e.g. into the languages of mathematics and logic.
This point should take us back to the social studies of science, which have now inspired multiple generations of philosophy to take practice seriously. Uncontested interpretation of the shared objects that make up our world is rare, and what we can learn from “practice” is no exception in this respect. My hope, then, is that the shift to practice marks a broadening of experience for philosophy rather than a doubling down on pursuing philosophy's historical quest for certainty [Dewey]. Perhaps the foundational questions most worth pursuing in this regard are when and why we should seek to converge on a shared understanding of scientific practice or diverge away from this ideal.