History of Science as History of Our Best Errors: Joseph Agassi’s Critical Historiography of Science

In his classic Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) – and in other related works spanning over his entire career (including Faraday as a Natural Philosopher, 1971; Science and Its History, 2008; and The Very Idea of Modern Science, 2013) – Joseph Agassi presents his wide-ranging and original understanding of the history of science. It emerges from the criticism of two distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism (scientific theories emerge from facts) and conventionalism (scientific theories are mathematical frameworks for classifying facts). Both produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions, in which errors are either concealed or condemned. Karl Popper’s philosophy, by contrast, allows for a picture in which science grows from the recognition and criticism of our best and wisest errors. The chapter presents and discusses Agassi’s proposal for a critical historiography of science, setting it against the background of Popper’s groundbreaking works in the philosophy of science. And it calls attention to what is possibly Agassi’s most relevant contribution to the historiography of science: regarding the history of metaphysics as integral to the history of scientific research, Agassi celebrates the wedding of the history of science with the history of ideas – a wedding that, unfortunately, is still widely contrasted by contemporary historians of science.