Pluralism: a curse or a blessing for social order?

There is a sense in which pluralism needs no advocate. It is enough to take a quick look at contemporary science to realise that pluralism is common currency. It is a ‘fact’ that scientific disciplines entail a plurality of approaches, methods, styles of inquiry. It is equally easy to acknowledge how the referents of scientific investigation require a concert of disciplines and a variety of explanatory strategies. So pluralism seems to have both an epistemological and an ontological backing.1 Nor is pluralism properly a new topic in philosophy of science. To some extent it is as old as its contending topic, the unity of science – that is at least as old as logical positivism, though back in those days, more than a properly well defined alternative perspective, it ranked as a critical reaction of the few against the many to the excesses of unification, and of reduction. One voice among the few was that of Patrick Suppes who, in a rather memorable PSA Presidential address in 1978, forcefully argued that neither the languages nor the subject matters of scientific disciplines were reducible to one.