On Allan Franklin’s Conjectural Realism

Franklin’s accurate historical studies are a useful, necessary corrective to the one-sided constructivist myth about scientists as behaving for all reasons other than rational ones, a myth on which many relativistic philosophies of sciences ground. However, the epistemological analysis of the nexus between theory and experience is not deep enough to formulate a theory of scientific experiment that can effectively challenge the relativistic philosophies of science. Franklin’s conjectural realism finds in the historical approach both its undeniable polemical force and its fundamental limits: it is epistemologically too weak to solve the problems concerning respectively the relationship between the context of discovery vs. the context of justification and the theory-ladenness of observation.