Abstract When Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953, one part of it that attracted the attention of several philosophers of science was his discussion of “seeing as” or “aspect perception”. N.R. Hanson and Thomas Kuhn are two main examples of the impact this had in the philosophy of science. In this paper we focus on a specific side of Wittgenstein’s discussion and its reception, namely his treatment of “aspect dawning”, which we distinguish from less open and less creative forms of aspect perception. As both Hanson and Kuhn note, transformative changes in science often start by new aspects of phenomena dawning on scientists, i.e., first coming into view and acquiring significance. To be fully effective, thus leading to new ways of “making sense” of things, those aspects then need to be “articulated”, i.e., expressed more fully in words, tied to scientific practice, and their conceptual structure elaborated systematically. While Hanson sheds light on the linguistic and conceptual sides of such articulation, via his treatment of scientific observation, Kuhn adds to the practical side, by providing an account of scientific problem solving and the central role of “exemplars” in it.
Abstract In this paper, I interpret Hesse’s accounts of scientific language and ordinary language as they develop across her career. My interpretation highlights how Hesse utilizes Friedrich Waismann’s open texture in the 1950s Max Black’s interaction view of metaphor in the 1960s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblances in her later work. My historical narrative shows how Hesse draws upon these linguistic philosophers to emphasize continuities between scientific language and ordinary language, culminating in her claim that all language is metaphorical. These continuities lead Hesse to argue that the history and philosophy of science is directly relevant to the philosophy of language. In particular, Hesse argues that some philosophers of language presuppose a picture of scientific language as univocal and literal, even though this view has been challenged by her and others working in history and philosophy of science. To my knowledge, this point has not received much attention, especially in philosophy of language. My interpretation of the development of Hesse’s views on language aims to make the case that historians and philosophers of science and philosophers of language still have much to learn by returning to Hesse’s work.
Abstract In March 2024, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy rejected the proposal for an Anthropocene Series/Epoch beginning in 1952. Yet the decision did not settle the meaning of “Anthropocene.” We reconstruct how an Earth-system diagnosis became a stratigraphic proposal through the identification of a candidate geological interval, marker selection and correlation, taxonomic assignment, and institutional adjudication. These operations did not map neatly onto the questions the proposal had to answer: whether a boundary-centered framework was appropriate, where its boundary should lie, what transformation it should represent, and what rank the unit warranted. An array of mid-twentieth-century stratigraphic signals documented a rapid departure from Holocene Earth-system baselines, with many changes persisting on geological timescales. This evidential achievement did not automatically determine framework, representation, or rank: a classificatory gap remained. Rejection also exposed a jurisdictional gap, since authority over the formal time scale did not confer equivalent authority over the term’s wider scientific uses. Stoppani’s nineteenth-century Anthropozoic provides a historical partial analogue through which alternative principl es of geological periodization become visible. The case explains how evidence of planetary transformation can coexist with disagreement over its classification and semantic authority.
Abstract Norwood Russell Hanson is primarily remembered as a critic of logical empiricism, despite never having mounted explicit philosophical critiques of logical positivism or falsificationism. Hanson viewed his own thought as a via media between different forms of analysis and distinct theoretical persuasions. Rather than putting forward a distinctive model or theory of how science does, or ought to, function, Hanson performed philosophical analyses of key concepts in science. Hanson’s eclectic philosophical toolbox drew most heavily from ordinary language philosophy, logical positivism, and pragmatism. He championed concepts as indispensable, and irreducibly philosophical, elements of all science, pushing conceptual analysis into domains that his predecessors had avoided. For instance, his arguments that observation is theory-laden and that there is a logic of discovery resulted from the application of philosophical and empirical analysis to subjects previously defined as off-limits.
Abstract Wittgenstein’s influence on Kuhn’s thought can be traced from his 1951 Lowell Lectures through The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to his last unfinished manuscript. Meaning as use, vague concepts, family resemblance, aspect seeing, paradigms as models, knowledge and certainty are some of the Wittgensteinian ideas that have left their imprint on Kuhn’s work. In the present paper, I argue that although Kuhn drew on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and agreed with him on fundamentals, he misread certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s work without threatening their overall alignment. I concentrate on three issues: Kuhn’s understanding of concepts, Kuhn’ s understanding of knowledge and certainty, and Kuhn’s take on the accessibility of radically different frameworks, as discussed in The Plurality of Worlds (2022), Kuhn’s unfinished manuscript.
