Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Contingentist/Inevitabilist Debate: Current State of Play, Paradigmatic Forms of Problems and Arguments, Connections to More Familiar Philosophical Themes - Léna Soler
Part I. Global Survey of the Problem Situation
1. Why Contingentists Should Not Care about the Inevitabilist Demand to “Put-Up-or-Shut-Up”: A Dialogic Reconstruction of the Argumentative Network - Léna Soler
2. Some Remarks about the Definitions of Contingentism and Inevitabilism - Catherine Allamel-Raffin and Jean-Luc Gangloff
Part II. Contingency, Ontology and Realism
3. Science, Contingency, and Ontology - Andrew Pickering
4. Scientific Realism and the Contingency of the History of Science - Emiliano Trizio
5. Contingency and Inevitability in Science: Instruments, Interfaces, and the Independent World - Mieke Boon
Part III. In Search of a Concrete and Empirically Tractable Way of Framing the Contingentist/Inevitabilist Issue
6. Contingency and “The Art of the Soluble” - Harry Collins
7. Contingency, Conditional Realism, and the Evolution of the Sciences - Ronald N. Giere
8. Necessity and Contingency in the Discovery of Electron Diffraction - Yves Gingras
Part IV. Contingency and Mathematics
9. Contingency in Mathematics: Two Case Studies - Jean Paul Van Bendegem
10. Freedom of Framework - Jean-Michel Salanskis
11. On the Contingency of What Counts as “Mathematics” - Ian Hacking
Part V. Widening the Scope of Contingentist/Inevitabilist Targets: Scientific Practices and the Methodological, Material, Tacit, and Social Dimensions of Science
12. The Science of Mind as It Could Have Been: About the Contingency of the (Quasi-) Disappearance of Introspection in Psychology - Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin
13. Laws, Scientific Practice, and the Contingency/Inevitability Question - Joseph Rouse
Part VI. Contingency and Scientific Pluralism
14. On the Plurality of (Theoretical) Worlds - Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
15. Cultivating Contingency: A Case for Scientific Pluralism - Hasok Chang
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index