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.
