History of Science, Epistemology,

and Ontology

Flavia Marcacci

Abstract  In his historical works, Agazzi explicitly examines some methodologi-

cal perspectives. As a matter of fact, according to him, the history of science needs
methodological perspectives in order to clarify its own contents. Similarly, episte-
mology needs the history of science to find realistically itself. These are, respec-
tively, a top-down and a bottom-up aspect of the relationship between history and
epistemology. Thus, history of science can be used not as a mere erudition exer-
cise, and epistemology can concretely improve any reasoning about science. As
a consequence of these considerations of Agazzi’s, at least two different ways to
practice history of science are determined. On the one hand, a historic history of
science; on the other hand, an epistemological history of science. But as is well
known, the methodology of history is a delicate question: historical events are
contingent and often unique; they have causes, which allow to study them scien-
tifically, but they cannot be predicted either deterministically or statistically, for
their causes are too many and complex. Many philosophical questions are opened:
for instance, whether the history of science reports just a gallery of images about
science and about reality, or it reports some knowledge about the ontology of sci-
entific objects. This paper supports the latter point of view, by inquiring in which
sense even history can be considered to have an ontic space.

1 Introduction

In the first chapter of his latest book, Scientific Objectivity and Its Contexts, Agazzi
examines the substitution of the notion of truth by that of objectivity in modern science
through a deep (historical) analysis of the philosophical sources. As a consequence of

F. Marcacci (*) 
Department of Basic Sciences and Foundations,
University of Urbino ‘Carlo Bo’, Urbino, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 231

M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_17
232 F. Marcacci

this substitution, the historical development of modern philosophy was characterized

by a dualistic epistemological approach. Thus, science was conceived as a “cognitive”
enterprise, but phenomenalistic epistemology was unable to explain how science could
relate to the real world.
The radical crisis of contemporary science, which occurred at the beginning of
the twentieth century, revealed that this belief was deceptive. These masterly pages
by Agazzi skillfully and harmoniously integrate the historical-critical and epis-
temological instances in a way useful for both the history and the philosophy of
science.
Historical analysis is in fact used to show the frequent confusion, even of the
terms themselves, between the epistemological and the ontological approach.
However, Agazzi insists on one point in particular: the passage from Galileo to
Kant was a shift from a conception of science based on careful observation of phe-
nomena—without however falling into dualism—to a conception of science and
knowledge based on phenomena in a way that radically excludes what lies behind
the phenomena. Kant’s intention was to promote a positive conception of “appear-
ance” (the “affections” of Galileo) in contrast to the negative Greek conception.
However, from then on—according to Agazzi—science had either to defend its
ability to describe reality, or to take refuge in conventionalist or instrumentalist
positions and use a phenomenalistic epistemology. Therefore, science is consid-
ered by some as «knowledge without truth, yet still deserving to be considered
knowledge» (Agazzi 2014: 9).
If Agazzi is right, as I believe he is, then the instrumentalist and phenomenalistic
philosophy of science has produced a history of science that is simply a gallery of
representations of reality that has nothing to do with reality itself. The aim of this
paper is to investigate how the history of science ought proceed to integrate the phi-
losophy of science and clarify which philosophical claims it is able to respond to.
To accomplish this, we must begin with Agazzi’s work as a historian of sci-
ence: his prestigious edition of the two-volumes Storia delle scienze, published
by Città Nuova in 1984, and the important critical edition of James C. Maxwell’s
Trattato di elettricità e magnetismo (Maxwell 1973). References to history and its
problems have never been lacking in his writings and reflections, augmenting their
weight and providing concrete examples to the more purely theoretical dimen-
sion of the philosophical speculation for which he is so well known and respected.
Perhaps for this reason alone it would not be enough to speak of Agazzi as a ‘his-
torian’ of science, but rather as an epistemologist of the history of science. In an
explicit (at times also implicit) way Agazzi allows history to be oriented towards
speculative reasoning and viceversa. This is currently a very relevant attitude, if we
consider that on the international scene we are still largely pondering the relation-
ship between the history and the philosophy of science, to the point that there are
organized philosophical paradigms such as historical epistemology and historical
ontology.
We will return to this important aspect at the end. We will begin now with a
digression guided by Agazzi’s own works.
History of Science, Epistemology, and Ontology 233

2 On History as Science and Science as History:

In Search of a Methodology

Writing the history of science a science is not an easy job. The Storia delle scienze
opens with a long and deep methodological introduction by Agazzi meant to raise
some of the many and very real problems involved in constructing a history of
science:
• Discussion of the “criteria of demarcation” between science and the non-science.
• Analysis of the meaning of the term “science” and the difficulties of find-
ing an agreed-upon meaning. (philosophia naturalis, episteme, techne,
metaphysics…)
• Determining a list of disciplines called “scientific”, about which the history of
science should be written.
• Analysis and choice of criteria for historical accuracy.
If these are problems every historian must confront, Agazzi points out two poten-
tial risks: reading the past in light of today’s scientific language and concepts, and
not at all “historically”; or, worse, “evaluating” the past in the light of contempo-
rary scientific ideas, reducing it to a “retrospective” of discovery and error that,
again, in no way grasps its historical meaning.
If, in fact, a “result” or a “discovery” is thought of as a simple and pure component of
ideal scientific knowledge, which is identified and collocated once and for all like a brick
in a wall, it takes on an ahistorical coloring and its comprehension is reduced to that of
its role within the logical-empirical context of science to which it belongs. Instead of a
historical process, science would appear to undergo an “internal growth”, not dissimilar
to that of a tree developing according to the preordained genetic plan of its seed. (Agazzi
1984, vol. I: 9).

Thus informed of the risks, we must not overlook the fact that our contemporary
perspective on history could represent an opportunity. It is important to escape the
false myth of a “complete historicization” with the pretense of understanding an
era by rigorously using only what belonged to that era. Rather, it is the presence
of “supra-historical” elements that allow us to get close to the past. Agazzi asserts
the importance of pinpointing elements of permanence of past science in present
science, and cites Euclidean geometry as an example: when a “value of knowl-
edge” (ibi: 10) persists, the history of science is not used as mere erudite cultural
satisfaction.
If it is difficult to do history as if it were a science, it is true that science is also
history. The historical components present in a scientific theory must always be
identified, isolated and then correlated within the theory itself. In this sense it is
useful to evaluate these components in and of themselves, and not confuse the
“value of knowledge” (or even the scientific tool) which makes the theory useful
even today. Various examples could confirm Agazzi’s thesis. Let me cite only one:
the early modern approach to astronomy, entirely astrometrical, was integrated into
234 F. Marcacci

and then replaced by observational astronomy and astrophysics,1 which use today
many more methods of analysis and instruments to observe and measure, beginning
with electromagnetic telescopes and continuing straight up to the “neutrino tele-
scope”. Nevertheless, astronomy and celestial mechanics, the oldest components of
astronomy, are today a less central component of the science of the cosmos. And
yet they are an important part. On December 19, 2013 the spacecraft Gaia went
into orbit as part of the European Space Agency’s space astrometry mission.
Returning to our discourse, it would be incorrect to suggest that studying the
astrometry of the Seventeenth Century helps us with that of today. Such a study
has a historical value which may rather be of interest to the philosophy of sci-
ence if it helps describe the scientific revolution in a new or unexpected way. This,
however, does not imply a ban on using current knowledge to better understand
the past. Proof is given by the widespread use of calculating programs to evaluate
archaeoastronomical data (for example, to verify a past eclipse) or to validate the
accounts of past astronomers in the history of experimental science (for example,
confirmation of observational data gathered by astronomers like Galileo.)
If science today is interested in confronting theories (on a synchronic level),
then the history of science is interested in the diachronic dimension of science
in order to understand theories in various periods. Even if this proves difficult, if
we want to develop a coherent and ordered discourse on the history of science we
need to stress a few fundamentals of historical research:
• Evaluation of the cultural context (e.g. instruments, cultural background, the
role of science in society…);
• Functionality of a scientific theory in its historical context (such as the astrometrical
techniques of our example);

1Modern science was born in the 1600s through changes wrought by astronomy: we all know

heliocentrism triumphed and Galileo wrote the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems (Imprimatur 1632, Index of Prohibited Books 1633), which caused a furor in the
Catholic Church. The scientific context of Galileo’s reflections is less known, however. After
the work of Tycho Brahe, nobody believed any longer in the Ptolemaic system. The attention of
professional astronomers was focused on the tension between the Tychonic, or quasi-Tychonic,
and Copernican systems. The title page which tells of this contest is famous: it is from the
Almagestum Novum (1651) by Giambattista Riccioli (1598–1671), which presents itself as a
powerful attempt to summarize this debate. Riccioli thoughtfully ‘dismantles’ the observational
data and new astronomical findings (the phases of Mercury and Venus, the moons of Jupiter, sun-
spots) and debated theories (tides) in order to show the plausibility of a semi-geocentric system.
This is to point out that with the scientific instruments of that time it was not possible to decide
on the ‘true system’ (even if Riccioli would propose a semi-Thychonic system with spiralling
planetary orbits). Why then did we eventually pass over to a heliostatic one, and one different
from that envisioned by Copernicus had? Not for astronomical reasons, but rather for physical
reasons: Newton was to explain the physical behavior of the planets through gravity in 1687. Not
until well into the second part of the 17th century there were enough clear reasons for choosing
one system over the another, even if many scientists were convinced of heliocentrism through
their scientific ‘instinct’. It was not a choice defensible by definitive astronomical proof, though.
That would arrive later, e.g. with Giambattista Guglielmini (1760–1817) in 1789–92 for terres-
trial rotation, and with Giuseppe Calandrelli (1749–1827) in 1806 for terrestrial revolution.
History of Science, Epistemology, and Ontology 235

• Supra-historical durability of data (e.g. trigonometrical calculations of the

1600s, still valid today, although in a different formalism);
• Study of the formation and conception of scientific objects over the course of
history (e.g. the change in meaning of the word “planet”).
In light of these considerations, we can understand why Agazzi is against the par-
tial and unilateral reduction of the history of science to an “internal” or “exter-
nal history”. The historian’s job is to assemble these two instances completely and
harmoniously. Depending on the particular and actual needs of his or her research,
the historian will have to use elements of both approaches. In Agazzi’s work we
can perceive a faint tendency to give more room to “external history”, but such a
preference is quickly rectified in favor of an ordered and scientific consideration
of historical research. When a historian has to narrate events connected through an
interdisciplinary approach to construct a credible and intelligible version of them,
his or her originality is inescapable. In such cases, the use of current scientific ter-
minology is not excluded.
Let’s now attempt to summarize Agazzi’s suggestions by identifying two ways
of writing the history of science: a historical history of science and an epistemo-
logical history of science.
1. The historical history of science would principally be the history of science
written using the standard methods of historical research: attention to sources
and documents, textual and contextual analysis, the appeal to philology, etc.
We might call this the bottom-up approach, as it begins with historical data in
order to reconstruct an adequate epistemological picture of events. This is in
part the work done by the “new philosophy of science”. This level of analy-
sis has inevitably influenced the philosophy of science in its epistemological
origin.
2. In the history of science what matters more are the theoretical perspective
and the conceptual keys orienting the historical reconstruction. This approach
might be called top-down, as it looks at history from a theoretical point of view,
which is initially independent from the historical data. For example, this hap-
pens when we evaluate past theories using present-day concepts: in the exam-
ple of astrometry of the 1600s, we might speak of the underdetermination of
competing astrometrical theories, although at the time no philosopher could
have come up with the idea of ‘underdetermination’. In light of such an idea,
however, many problematic relations among theories can be explained. This
level of analysis implicates epistemological problems (as how we know the
reality of which scientific theories speak) even before ontological ones (what
reality is behind the theories).
These two ways can and must be methodologically integrated at various levels:
given a specific scientific theory, we study its historical content, make an episte-
mological analysis and give an evaluation to summarize it. At each of these levels,
the historical and epistemological sensibilities come into continuous contact with
each other (Fig. 1).
236 F. Marcacci

Fig. 1  Interaction between historical analysis and epistemology

3 An Ontic Space in the History of Science:

The Unpredictable Contingent

If we have moved into methodological territory, what philosophical work is there left
to do? It would seem that it is a contest between two tendencies: absolutizing history
and relativizing knowledge (historicism) or relativizing history and submitting it to
knowledge (idealism). Rightly, Agazzi writes:
We can write history since not everything is historically determined, since certain supra-
historical elements exist which, present in our day, give us the possibility of using them
as a guide to read the past and likewise to understand which different collocations
and functions they were able to receive in that past (Agazzi 1984: 9).

That is, science shows something that, although partial, is real: partial with regard
to the historical context, real with regard to that which it attempts to describe.
One might think that, as certainty is never guaranteed, science constructs inter-
pretative pictures which inasmuch as possible are plausible. This would be the rea-
son for which, throughout history, no matter what Laudan says in his famous list
of false but tenacious arguments (Laudan 1981), those theories that paint a realis-
tic picture of reality have a better chance. And yet Putnam wrote
The assertion that ‘the Earth is flat’ was, without doubt, rationally acceptable for three
thousand years. Today it is absolutely not. And yet it would have been wrong to hold that
such a statement was true three thousand years ago, as that would mean the Earth had
changed shape since then.” (Putnam 1981: 55).

Putnam’s observation is useful to us not so much for the questions it raises

about the relationship between science and reality, which we cannot deal with
here, but rather about the relationship between science and scientific reality, in
History of Science, Epistemology, and Ontology 237

its “historical” characterization. In effect, historical facts carry a great deal of

weight in science. Consider, for example, that there is really no need for scientists
to agree on which tools to use in their work in any given era: the agreement has
already been made for them first during their education and then in their working
years. But such an agreement is a symptom of historical determinism, as are the
use of certain instruments and not others, the accidental nature of certain discover-
ies and the refinement of certain concepts. These are historical facts, then, and not
merely theoretical necessities (Agazzi 1992).
Yet, they are not only historical facts:
In itself, it was certainly a good thing to introduce historical and social awareness to the
understanding of science, and it is also useful to submit the scientific enterprise to socio-
logical study: the information we get is always interesting and enlightening. It is another
thing, though, to insist on reducing scientific knowledge to nothing more than a social
product. This is the error of much sociological epistemology, which has never really been
able to show the causal link between the social conditions in a given place and time and,
for example, the shape of the natural laws expressed there, in addition to the inability
to explain the cross-cultural acceptance of the contents of scientific knowledge (whose
validity, therefore, doesn’t seem “relativized” by the social circumstances that produce it)
(Agazzi 1992: 39).

We can use Agazzi’s words to pose a problem: how to pinpoint Agazzi’s cognitive
value in the history of science and make it useful in addressing reality? Adopting the
mentality of classical metaphysics often followed by Agazzi, we might ask how the
history of science can contribute to investigating the thing which is and not only its
representation? A balanced view of history’s role in science which doesn’t reduce
everything to history is therefore epistemologically important in order not to relin-
quish saying something ontic, not to give into the idea that everything is mere repre-
sentation, and not to reduce knowledge to an entirely relativistic sociocultural matter.
In other words, the historical dimension of science shows us how contingency
plays an important role in the growth of scientific knowledge. This fact has an
interesting philosophical dimension which forces us to ask ourselves what is to be
understood by the word “science”, if it means not just formal analysis and experi-
ment, but also contingency and fortuity. In his book Epistemologia e scienze umane
(Agazzi 1979) Agazzi looks into the concept of “scientificity” itself with the aim of
piecing together a constructive interdisciplinary definition of it. It is undeniable that
certain disciplines such as physics and mathematics are dominant, when it comes to
establishing criteria for scientificity, because of their ability to present themselves
as highly persuasive fields of knowledge, and have inevitably become models for
other types of knowledge. But “science can have many meanings,” wrote Aristotle.
What we need to do is to propose a kind of model of the concept of science,
one which is flexible enough not to be taken prisoner by a single example yet at
the same time avoids emptiness. That is, namely, to avoid the outcome in which
any and every subject may in the end call itself scientific.
As with scholasticism, analogic is that which is a halfway to “univocal” (indi-
cating a single type of reality) and “equivocal” (vague and multipurpose enough to
be attributed to many realities). Agazzi pauses here to discuss two aspects which
238 F. Marcacci

are more or less attributed to scientific discourse: rigor and objectivity. Without
going through Agazzi’s entire reasoning process, I will look at his conclusions:
• As regards the concept of rigor, it is suggested that all types of knowledge that
wish to call themselves “sciences” must be able to show the deductive rigor of
their reasoning based on the elucidation of their own premises and the logical
connections between premises and conclusions, as well as the ability to return
to the facts that are to be proved. This doesn’t mean that the initial hypotheses
can’t be modified, but simply that such modification must be done openly so
that one’s reasoning may come under scrutiny.
• As regards the concept of objectivity, it is not reducible to either that of math-
ematization or that of quantification. If anything, it is reducible to that of
intersubjectivity, as something which does not depend exclusively on a single
subject. In effect, “objective” should be that which is inherent in the object
much more than “something which is not inherent in the subject.” But science,
before it is a discourse on being, is a discourse on being known. In this sense
science shouldn’t settle for an intersubjective agreement “of awareness” (risking
the reduction of knowledge to awareness) or of “perception” (risking the reduc-
tion of knowledge to perception), but should rather focus on an agreed use of a
given predicate. If in this regard the exact and natural sciences have amassed a
great literature, the same cannot be said of the humanities.
Agazzi proceeds suggesting that knowledge cannot be considered scientific only
in relation to the object under investigation: any object can in fact be the object of
various scientific disciplines. Even the objects of the exact sciences are susceptible
and can be dealt with through “non-exact” approaches (Agazzi 1979: 74–75). To
illustrate this point, we shall think of a hot air balloon: this object that can be stud-
ied in the fluid dynamics, or in the history of the means of transportation, or be the
subject of a poem like the famous poem by Vincenzo Monti Al signor Montgolfier.
The history of science moves ahead precisely along this ridge between the human-
ities and the exact sciences, since it employs languages, concepts and reasons from
each of these areas. Thus, a philosophical approach to the history of science needs
to consult and integrate all those other approaches, in order to offer a complete and
objective account. This is why history of science also raises profound philosophi-
cal questions.
A wide-ranging theoretical response to the issues Agazzi has raised would be
desirable, for these issues are vital also to the philosophical and scientific disci-
plines. The recent suggestion of a “historical epistemology” appears to move in
this direction, and so do some other proposals: the idea of an “applied metaphys-
ics” (concerning the conditions that make an idea “thinkable”, Daston 2000); the
study of the material preconditions of science (with direct impacts also on the
debate between realism and antirealism in science); or the conception of histori-
cal epistemology as a historically-based theory of the long-term developments of
scientific knowledge, supported by an established, empirically-based epistemology
(e.g., the cognitive sciences) (Renn and Hyman 2012: 20).
History of Science, Epistemology, and Ontology 239

Trying to discern a common trend among these suggestions, we might hypothesize

a historical analysis, which questions the transformations of the “objects” (including
concepts, laws, or theories) which populate science. A trivial example already men-
tioned is the semantic slip of the word planet, but we might also consider terms like
epigenetics, probability, and many others. Hacking speaks of a “historical ontology”
by asserting that there are objects that begin and cease to “exist”, and historical ontol-
ogy should investigate the causes of their “birth” and “death”. That is, we should
investigate how the various scientific entities were introduced or rejected in the course
of history (Hacking 2002). Similarly, we might speak of a “historical ontology of sci-
ence” as the completion of a “historical epistemology”: i.e., of the study of the pro-
cesses by which theories themselves (or paradigms, or similar meta-entities) and their
objects appear and disappear in the history.
Of course, a “historical ontology” cannot by itself decide which entities have
some value which is not purely historical, i.e. which ones really exist or don’t. To
be sure, this is a question we cannot avoid asking, but which must be answered in
the light of the best presently accepted theories.
So, why should a historical ontology of science interest us? Of course, in order
to explore the various kinds of critical approach, cultural backgrounds, and practi-
cal or political interests orienting the research, etc. Eventually, also the question
of the truth conditions of historiographic theories themselves and the criteria for
ascertaining their truth-values becomes relevant and inescapable. All of this is
surely very interesting for epistemology, too.
Secondly, a historical ontology helps to find out whether something “true”
and “real” remains despite scientific change (e.g., the trigonometry used in the
Ptolemaic astronomy). This is significant for two reasons: showing that “truth can
resist tenaciously”, and that science, while having an intrinsic historical nature,
can nonetheless represent reality. The history of science is not just a story of theo-
ries that merely imagined reality, but of theories that somehow grasped at least
some authentic part of reality; the image we get from the history of science is not
that of a merely conventional enterprise, but of how reality is progressively under-
stood in a deeper and deeper way.
Nevertheless, if we wish to speak of a “historical ontology of science”, the
presence of unique events and their role in the construction of the scientific theo-
ries has to be justified and included. This is not of course a question that we can
even initially take up here. Rather, I just want to notice that one of the main prob-
lems we encounter in this discussion is the peculiar nature of historical events:
they are often unique and unrepeatable, totally casual and accidental. According to
the classic metaphysical tradition, there cannot be a science about this kind of
facts. In order to be an object of science, an event or an object must be predicated
necessarily and universally (An. Pr. I, 13) or, at least, usually (ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ, ut
frequenter: An. Post. I, 11).2

2In fact, there are events happening necessarily and always (e.g. the sunrise), and events happening

usually (e.g. the generation of a plant). But a science of what is unique and unrepeatable, of what
is totally casual and accidental is impossible (e.g. Fis. II, 8, 198b10–199a8).
240 F. Marcacci

Even setting aside the interpretative problems concerning this complex issue in
Aristotle, it is clear that in his view frequent events can be studied scientifically
because what happens frequently has a constant (although not necessary) cause.
Nonetheless, it should be noticed that even when historical events are unique,
apparently casual and accidental, still they have causes. So they too can be studied
scientifically. No doubt, they are contingent, for their causes are themselves con-
tingent; and they seem accidental (i.e., they cannot be predicted exactly, and never
happen in the same way) because since they typically depend on an open plurality
of always changing causes.
Theories, paradigms, discoveries, etc., are precisely historical entities in this
sense, unique and unpredictable, but amenable to (meta) scientific study. So, a
“historical ontology of science” must be very clear about this when it seeks to find
out the truth about them, and to provide an ontology for them. Even history has an
ontic space to be understood.

4 Conclusion: The History of Science Between

Epistemology and Historical Ontology

How do we organize an epistemology of the history of science which does not

reduce it to a mere narrative of representations whatever, but captures its ontologi-
cal scope as well? The top-down/bottom-up methodology can offer us a decent
methodological recommendation. Keeping Agazzi’s two suggestions together—
that the humanities furnish themselves with working definitions and that we adopt
an idea of science as “analogy”—we might even hope that the historical knowl-
edge of science equip itself with a “formal” epistemology which is able to make
the chosen assumptions visible in every era and in light of particular theories. In
any case, the direction we need to take is fourfold:
• The history of science can be considered a science, even if this involves raising
a number of epistemological questions about it.
• Science is historical, and what in it is historical and contingent, nonetheless has
scientific and philosophical value.
• History of science is the history of theories about the reality we know. Ontology
and epistemology change along with these theories.
• History of science does not speak only of a succession of theories as if they
were a series of imaginary representations of reality, but rather of theories that
have some kind of ontological meaning.
The first two points focus on a methodology according to which epistemology
and history of science have to work together in two directions: bottom-up and top-
down. The last two points focus on the distinction between historical ontology of
­science and historical epistemology of science within the framework of the history
of science.
History of Science, Epistemology, and Ontology 241

It seems to me that we can assert that all four points convey and respect
Agazzi’s lessons, who as a philosopher of science has not forgotten the importance
of verifying the historical foundation of every theoretical supposition. Vice versa,
as a historian he has understood the importance of identifying those theoretical
junctions in history, which clarify the present and help us to consider future devel-
opments in science. In addition, he does all this in the hope that philosophy and
history really can question reality and not reduce it to a mere representation.

References

Agazzi, Evandro. 1979. Analogicità del concetto di scienza. Il problema del rigore e
dell’oggettività nelle scienze umane. In Epistemologia e scienze umane, ed. Vittorio Possenti,
57–76. Milano: Massimo.
Agazzi, Evandro. 1984. Storia delle Scienze.2 voll. Roma: Città Nuova Editrice.
Agazzi, Evandro. 1992. Il bene, il male e la scienza. Le dimensioni etiche dell’impresa scientifico-
tecnologica. Milano: Rusconi.
Agazzi, Evandro. 2014. Scientific Objectivity and its context. Cham: Springer.
Daston, Lorraine. 2000. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hacking, Ian. 2002. Historical Ontology. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Laudan, Larry. 1981. A Confutation of Convergent Realism. Philosophy of Science 48.1: 19–49.
http://philoscience.unibe.ch/documents/TexteFS11/Laudan1981.pdf. Accessed 21 January 2015.
Maxwell, James Clerk. 1973. Trattato di elettricità e magnetismo, ed. Evandro Agazzi. Torino: Utet.
Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Renn, Jürgen, and Hyman, Malcolm D. 2012. The Globalization of Knowledge in History: An
Introduction. In The Globalization of Knowledge in History, ed. JürgenRenn: 15–44. Berlin:
Edition Open Access.