In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study...

Mature sciences have been long been characterized in terms of the "successfulness," "reliability" or "trustworthiness" of their theoretical, experimental or technical accomplishments. Today many philosophers of science talk of "robustness," often without specifying in a precise way the meaning of this term. This lack of clarity is the cause of frequent misunderstandings, since all these notions, and that of robustness in particular, are connected to fundamental issues, which concern nothing less than the very nature of science and its specificity with respect to other human practices, the...

LENA SOLER This volume is a collection of essays devoted to the analysis of scientific change and stability. It represents the most recent thinking on the topic of incommensurability and scientific theory change. It explores the balance and tension that exists between commensurability and continuity (or stabilities) on the one hand, and incommen- rability and discontinuity (or ruptures) on the other. And it discusses some central epistemological consequences regarding the nature of scientific progress, rationality and realism. With respect to these topics, it investigates a number of new...

Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental data, ontological commitments, and so forth have been significantly different? Science as It Could Have Been focuses on a crucial issue that contemporary science studies have often neglected: the issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplines--physics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychology--to explore whether components of human science are inevitable, or if we could have developed an alternative...