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SUMMARY:Negotiating history: contingency\, canonicity and case studies - A
 gnes Bolinska and Joseph Martin (Department of History and Philosophy of S
 cience)
DTSTART:20190130T130000Z
DTEND:20190130T143000Z
UID:TALK118318@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Matt Farr
DESCRIPTION:Objections to the use of historical case studies for philosoph
 ical ends fall into two categories. Methodological objections claim that h
 istorical accounts and their uses by philosophers are subject to various b
 iases. We argue that these challenges are not special\; they also apply to
  other forms of philosophical reasoning. Metaphysical objections\, on the 
 other hand\, claim that historical case studies are intrinsically unsuited
  to serve as evidence for philosophical claims\, even when carefully const
 ructed and used\, and so constitute a distinct class of challenge. We show
  that attention to what makes for a canonical case can address these probl
 ems. A case study is canonical with respect to a particular philosophical 
 aim when the features relevant to that aim provide a reasonably complete c
 ausal account of the results of the historical process under investigation
 . We show how to establish canonicity by evaluating relevant contingencies
  using two prominent examples from the history of science: Eddington's con
 firmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity using his data from t
 he 1919 eclipse and Watson and Crick's determination of the structure of D
 NA.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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