Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine

Noretta Koertge received a B.S. and an M.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1955 and 1956, respectively, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science at the University of London, Chelsea College, where she studied with Heinz Post and Karl Popper.

She is former editor of the journal Philosophy of Science. She is editor in chief of the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 2007.

Koertge has research interests in scientific methodology, the development of science, ethical and value issues in science, and critiques of feminist perspectives on science. Other interests include the philosophy and history of chemistry, philosophy of social science, and history of sexuality.

Professor Koertge has published numerous anthologies and articles in the philosophy of science, including:

• "Galileo and the Problem of Accidents." Journal of the History of Ideas, 1977
• "Lakatos and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes." Pragmatik, 1995
• A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science ,1998
• Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology, 2003
• Scientific Values and Civic Virtues, 2005

“On the view that was standard up through the 1970s and early 1980s, one of Frege's central innovations was to put language and the theory of meaning (rather than epistemology) at the center of philosophy. It is an odd view, in light of Frege’s own characterization of his central project as epistemological—as an attempt settle the question of whether our knowledge of arithmetic (as well as most of mathematics) is a priori or a posteriori, synthetic or analytic. Odder still, given that, on Frege’s view, these categories are epistemological: the correct categorization of an item of knowledge is determined by the sort of justification that item requires. The focus of most of my work on Frege has been to make sense of Frege’s writings in the light of his own epistemological characterization of his project.

In my most recent work on Frege, I address the matter of how exactly we are to understand the work for which he is most renowned: his writings about language. This work, I argue, was meant as a contribution to the epistemological project. And to understand it in this way is to see that Frege does not view himself as providing a semantics, either for natural language or for his logically perfect language.

I have also begun a new, related, but non-historical project. The thrust of the project is to argue that our thinking about the semantics of natural language has gone astray because of our failure to appreciate how semantics needs to be constrained by the methodology of the special sciences. My contention is that many philosophers writing today are promulgating views that require the rejection of widely accepted and unobjectionable methodologies of productive scientific inquiry. The science on which I particularly focus is the science of epidemiology and biostatistics. What I mean to show is that the key to rectifying what is going wrong is to adopt a new Frege-inspired approach to the semantics of natural language.”