Description: Science as It Could Have Been focuses on the crucial issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplines--physics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychology--to explore whether components of human science are inevitable, or if we could have developed an alternative successful science based on essentially different notions, conceptions, and results.
Review Quotes: A great merit of this volume is that it provides the sophisticated framework that the contingency debate has needed. The editors and contributors are to be commended for presenting the contingency debate so fully. 'Science as It Could Have Been' is a powerful defense of the contingency of our science but also-perhaps more importantly-of our ways of thinking philosophically about it. If the history of science could have gone differently, then so, too, could the history of the philosophy of science.-- "Studies in History and Philosophy of Science"