A Study Of Kitcher's Organization Of Cognitive Labor

Philip Kitcher is one of the most outstanding philosophers of science today. He makes a series of innovative discussion about the topics such as the microstructure of the development of science, the progress of science and the diversity of the progress in his book The Advancement of Science. The most valuable is that, as a contemporary philosopher, Kitcher analyzes material and the practical process of scientific research and accordingly reveals the essence and the rationality of science from a micro-perspective, rather than from the macro-perspective. Based on the ideas above, Kitcher puts forward the theroy of the organization of cognitive labor in that book.Kitcher investigates all kinds of subtleties about the progress of scientific research and argues for the rational character of the scientific progress profoundly and detailedly in the theory of organization of cognitive labor. This paper discusses both kitcher's paper rational principle of scientific research and the social process, and argues the relationship between the individual rationality and the rationality scientific community of science by Mathematical models. Then this paper disproves strongly some opinions about the irrational and social factors' excessive impact on scientific knowledge and offers the intuitionistic and practical proofs to the main idea such as his views about the advancement and rationality of science from a microscopic angle. The process of his reasoning is full of practical significance and worthy of deep reflection from both method and content. Therefore, I analyze and discuss profoundly about the theory and attempt to make some innovations in this thesis based on grasping the main points.This article is mainly divided into five following chapters. In the first chapter, I introduce the basic meaning, the questions to be solved, the method of reasoning of Kitcher's theory of organization of cognitive labor and the standpoint of it in The Advancement of Science. I explain kitcher's conceptions of authority, cooperation, the division of cognitive labor and innovation, including kitcher's Mathematics models in the second and the third chapter. In the chapter four, I summarize some views and evaluation of academic peers about the theory of organization of cognitive labor. In the chapter five, I put forward some tentative views, and hope to make a supplementary to the problems left over in Kithcer's organization of cognitive labor from the point of view of the scientific paradigm.