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...

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...

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...