The Construction, Selection and Content of Scientific Theories

在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，库欣教授在过去几年中一直致力于对当代物理学事件进行广泛的、以哲学为导向的案例研究。有了这笔资金，他将把这些案例研究作为他对科学理论的构建、选择和内容的调查的一部分。他所发展的理论将占据一种介于“逻辑学家”的过度理性重构和某些知识社会学家的过度反理性重构之间的中间地带。他的模型将被“归化”，因为它是基于对当前真实科学实践的实际历史记录的详细检查，这将为科学方法在研究科学事业本身中应用提供“数据”；“社会化”是指在科学理论的构建和论证过程中考虑到“外部的”社会和个人因素；“高度约束”在于，一旦理论框架被暂时接受用于开发和测试，它就会识别并详细检查理论框架中不是唯一决定的“内部”逻辑，并且通常是强烈的引人注目的逻辑。这项工作将对正在进行的关于人类知识主张的认识论支持的哲学问题的讨论做出重要而非常有用的贡献，尤其是对这些关于科学的主张。

Professor Cushing, with support from the National Science Foundation, has been working over the past several years on extensive, philosophically oriented case studies of episodes in contemporary physics. With this grant, he will use these case studies as part of his investigation of the construction, selection and content of scientific theories. The theory which he is developing will occupy a kind of middle ground between the overly rational reconstructions of "logicists" and the overly anti-rational reconstructions of some sociologists of knowledge. His model will be "naturalized" in that it is based upon a detailed examination of the actual historical record of current, real scientific practice which will provide the 'data' to which the methods of science are applied in studying the scientific enterprise itself; "socialized" in that it takes cognizance of 'external' social and individual factors in the construction and justification of scientific theories; "highly constrained" in that it recognizes and examines in detail the not uniquely determining 'internal' and often strongly compelling logic of a theoretical framework once that framework has been even tentatively accepted for development and testing. This work will be an important and highly useful contribution to the ongoing discussion of the philosophical problem of epistemic support for human knowledge claims, most especially for such claims about science.