Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The impossibility of finitism: from SSK to ESK?
AU - Tyfield, David
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - The dramatic and ongoing changes in the funding of science have stimulated interest in an economics of scientific knowledge (ESK), which would investigate the effects of these changes on the scientific enterprise. Hands (1994) has previously explored the lessons for such an ESK from the existing precedent of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). In particular, he examines the philosophical problems of SSK and those that any ESK in its image would face. This paper explores this argument further by contending that more recent literature in SSK exposes even deeper philosophical problems than those identified by Hands. Meaning finitism has emerged as the philosophical core of SSK. An examination of the profound problems with this position is used to show that an underlying extensionalism is the root of SSK’s intractable philosophical difficulties, and to illustrate the entirely different approach of a critical philosophy that is advocated in its place. In this way, the project of an ESK is shown to depend upon a critical philosophy.
AB - The dramatic and ongoing changes in the funding of science have stimulated interest in an economics of scientific knowledge (ESK), which would investigate the effects of these changes on the scientific enterprise. Hands (1994) has previously explored the lessons for such an ESK from the existing precedent of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). In particular, he examines the philosophical problems of SSK and those that any ESK in its image would face. This paper explores this argument further by contending that more recent literature in SSK exposes even deeper philosophical problems than those identified by Hands. Meaning finitism has emerged as the philosophical core of SSK. An examination of the profound problems with this position is used to show that an underlying extensionalism is the root of SSK’s intractable philosophical difficulties, and to illustrate the entirely different approach of a critical philosophy that is advocated in its place. In this way, the project of an ESK is shown to depend upon a critical philosophy.
KW - economics of science
KW - sociology of scientific knowledge(SSK)
KW - meaning finitism
KW - extensionalism
KW - critical philosophy
M3 - Journal article
VL - 1
SP - 61
EP - 86
JO - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics
JF - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics
SN - 1876-9098
IS - 1
ER -