Reflexiones sobre interdisciplina entre filosofía y biología (original) (raw)

Realismo y antirrealismo en la filosofía de la biología

Until recently the philosophy of biology has not paid much attention to the topic of realism. There has been a tendency to think that biology was a breeding ground of realism, and it was supposed that the antirealist could not find examples as favourable as those taken from physics. The existence of theoretical entities of biology (genes, ecological communities, species, etc.) is not usually questioned (although some authors do it). Besides that, the theoretical hypotheses, models and metaphors in biology are not as far away from the ontological postulates of common sense as are those of some physical theories. And finally, the main arguments against realism (incommensurability, pessimistic induction, and underdetermination) does not seem to fit as well into biology as into physics. However, the situation is rather more complicated than what this opinion suggests. There are yet several analysis of biology engaged with some variety of antirealism, both in regards to the existence of certain entities and in regards to the way in which the theories should be interpreted. We will review here some of the most significant of them and we will draw some conclusions on the role of biology in the debate of scientific realism. The aim of this paper is to show with the help of these examples that the biology has not been ignored in the debate of realism, and that, far from being a better ground for realism, the epistemological controversies raised by specifically biological problems have shown that the antirealist side can also provide us with interesting arguments. It will be argued finally that one of the more powerful arguments for realism, the ‘miracle argument’, works better in physics than in biology. The strength of this argument is based on the implausibility of the alternative explanations of such a singular things as the prediction of completely unknown and unexpected phenomena, as the extreme quantitative coincidences between theoretical predictions and the experimental data, or as the mutual support of independent theories. But none of these things is present in biology in a comparable way to the physics.