Theodore and Grace de Laguna’s Philosophies of Science: Lessons about Popper, Kuhn, and the History of Philosophy of Science

I present the two philosophies of science developed by Theodore de Laguna and Grace Andrus de Laguna in America before the 1930s arrival of the logical positivists there. I also provide a contextualised comparison of these pre-logical positivist views with the post-positivist views of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. We will see that the de Lagunas articulate the key influential aspects of the philosophies of science of Popper and Kuhn and, with the help of a more developed theoretical framework than that of Popper or Kuhn, address what came to be key challenges to these later thinkers’ views. We will also see that ‘Kuhnian’ ideas were ubiquitous in America during the 1930s and 1940s. These observations allow me to further support the recent thesis that the logical positivists were proposing a narrowing down and winding back of philosophy of science when they arrived in America. Indeed, it will be challenging to rationally reconstruct the history of the philosophy of science which developed later. It was still, even after Kuhn in the early 1960s, playing catch up with the speculative tradition to which the de Lagunas belonged. My observations also suggest that Kuhn was an important conduit through which ideas from the speculative tradition made their way into analytic philosophy of science.