Truth or coherence? How Adam Smith used philosophical sources to explain how paradigms change
通过分析亚当·斯密《天文学史》中未被重视的哲学来源（如哥白尼、贝克莱），论证斯密认为外部现实存在但被感知和理论过滤，科学并非反映客观真理而是重构现实，这对理解经济学范式变迁有启发。
Abstract The ‘History of Astronomy’ is fundamental to understanding Smith’s epistemology. The most problematic issue of this text is that Smith intended to analyse the history of astronomy according not to the principles of ‘truth’ that they embodied, but in terms of their logical coherence. However, he was also influenced by Newton’s realism. My thesis is that Smith had no doubts that external reality exists, but believed that it is necessarily filtered by our perceptions and our scientific beliefs. Perceptions and theories do not reflect objective reality as such but reconstruct it according to the procedures and constraints that characterise them. Two generally neglected Smithian sources, Copernicus and Berkeley and ‘Of the External Senses’ seem to legitimize this interpretation. At first sight, Fontenelle used the same arguments of Berkeley and Smith, but the difference is that Fontenelle was convinced that astronomical science is characterised by progress toward truth.