New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress ed. by Yafeng Shan
本书汇集历史案例与哲学讨论，探讨科学进步的概念，其中第12章专门讨论经济学进步，其他章节涉及社会学、化学等，适合经济思想史学者和科学哲学家参考。
This edited volume offers a rich mosaic of historical case studies alongside philosophical discussion on the topic of scientific progress. It may not, of course, be entirely clear initially how such a text will be of use to historians of economic thought. But I think it could offer a toolbox of resources that promises different ways of framing how we examine and narrate the history of economic thought. And I hope it will give historians and philosophers of science the opportunity to interface more closely with one another.Readers of this journal will, of course, want to flip immediately to chapter 12, “Progress in Economics,” by Marcel Boumans and Catherine Herfeld. This short chapter packs a huge punch, bringing together some history of econometric modeling with contemporary philosophy of science. Taking as a historical case study the development of business cycle models running from Tinbergen to Frisch, the authors note that progress in economics (at least, if we are concerned with the part of economics marked by mathematical modeling) can be described as the use and discarding of model templates, a notion borrowed from Knuuttila and Loettgers (2016, 2020). Such templates require substantial interpretation in order to make empirical inferences. The deep point that Boumans and Herfeld make is that sometimes the conceptual and empirical context has a hand in shaping what the mathematical structure of a problem looks like, and not just the other way around.But other chapters, too, should interest the historian of economics, or at least the philosophically inclined historian. The middle set of chapters, a series of case studies from all sorts of scientific disciplines, will probably hold the greatest appeal for this journal's audience, and the spirit of some of these questions will be familiar to those of us thinking about economics. For instance, take the following. A chapter that may seem far away from the historian of economics' concern—Robin Findlay Hendry's chapter on the progress in chemistry (chap. 6)—carefully sifts through several historical episodes of so-called revolutions in chemistry through a philosopher's lens in order to suggest that, indeed, science can be cumulative in a conservative sense. One can imagine—and, of course, historians have thought about—whether such a thesis can also be supported in economics. (And speaking of chemistry—the following chapter, chap. 7, also on chemistry, immediately reminded this reviewer of the question of microfoundations in economics.)The chapter on sociology (chap. 11) suggests this question: What kind of history of economics does the historian of economics tell? One could interpret the progress of economics as Stephen Turner does the progress of sociology—rather than a linear history of internally generated puzzles being solved one after another, Turner offers a vision of the history of the social sciences as one that is purpose relative, that seems to do something other than offer generalizations, where what counts as a problem depends on local facts and arises for external reasons (such as political ones), and the very tools of science change as the world changes.In addition to these, at least one chapter also deals explicitly with political economy. In chapter 13 one finds a story of how the development of biomedicine, considered an exemplar of scientific progress, is deeply intertwined with the shape of political economy. Harold Cook's brief excursion into the history of quinine (and other antimalaria drugs) shows how the drug from a bark native to South America to treat fevers becomes the recognizable specific chemical we know as quinine, a history that involved questions about how to best transport the bark, how to implement quality control, whose production of it was superior to whose, and where to cultivate it in order to meet growing demand.While I think the largest attraction of this book will be this middle chunk, the volume is bookended by useful philosophical modules. The first (chaps. 1–4) is an in-depth overview of four main approaches to thinking about progress, not only providing a thorough introduction to the basics for the audience but to more cutting-edge versions as well. These are the epistemic approach, the semantic approach, the functional approach, and the noetic approach. The first conceives of scientific progress as increases in scientific knowledge; the second, as increases in “truthlikeness”; the third, in terms of increases in usefulness, broadly construed; and the last, in terms of understanding. These will be of interest to those who are concerned directly with how to make sense of scientific progress as a concept.The last part (chaps. 14–20) is a series of philosophical commentaries on how scientific progress intersects with a wide-ranging set of concerns. The questions the chapters ask include the following: “How should aesthetic values have epistemic impact?” (chap. 16); “What to make of idealized models?” (chap. 17); and, “Should, and how should, speculation have a place in science?” (chap. 18). Such questions could easily be adapted to the more particular context of economic science. These will be, of course, relevant to anyone who is interested and works in the philosophy of science. But I think there is room for the historian, too. For example, the last chapter, by Michela Massimi (chap. 20), reflects on the notion of science and scientific knowledge as public goods; these musings invite the reader to think about what science is, and should be—these are, surely, questions that also drive the way science looks over time.All in all, the text is a nice reference to have on hand, and I think reading through its various chapters would provide the historian of economics with a fun exercise to extract useful tools to exploit, at the very least. But I think on a more serious level there is a lot to mine here for resources, and plenty of opportunities for the different disciplines (and historians of different disciplines) to talk to one another. (Chap. 19 even discusses progress and interdisciplinarity.) I hope readers of this journal will take the invitation seriously.