Against the Bouncers at the Gates of Science

Philosophers of science consider themselves the bastion of traditional rationalist philosophy. They share with their classical predecessors the hostility to metaphysics. They are usually ignorant of it, protested Feyerabend, who condemned them as bouncers to science as an elite club. His protest was excessive and so ineffective. Kuhn and Lakatos advocated bouncing, as did Michael Polanyi before and Steven Shapin after. Still, they all rightly viewed science as a social phenomenon rather than a psychological one, as most inductive philosophers still do. The worst thing about bouncing is that it isolates the club of science from other aspects of our culture, quite contrary to familiar facts.