The informational gene and the substantial body: On the generalization of evolutionary theory by abstraction (original) (raw)
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From Philosophy to Science (To Natural Philosophy): Evolutionary Developmental Perspectives
The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2008
This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relation between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or data gathering) and epistemology (explanatory evaluation or data interpretation).
The Limits of Abstraction: Towards a Phenomenologically Reformed Understanding of Science
Husserl argued that psychology needs to establish an abstraction that is opposite to the abstraction successfully established in the natural sciences. While the natural sciences abstract away the psychological or subjective, psychology must abstract away the physical or worldly. However, Husserl and other phenomenologists such as Iso Kern have argued that there is a crucial systematic disanalogy between both abstractions. While the abstraction of the natural sciences can be performed completely, the abstraction of psychology cannot. In this context, Husserl argues that the psychological reduction leads to paradoxes. In this paper, I critically discuss whether it is true that the natural sciences can successfully abstract away the subjective. Or more precisely, I raise the question of whether they should.
A Piecewise Aggregation of (Some) Philosophers’ and Biologists’ Perspectives
Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings is about new approaches to many of the big topics in philosophy of science today, but with a very different take. To begin with, we are urged to reject the received Cartesian-Laplacean myths: Descartes’ certainty and Laplace’s computational omniscience. Instead, Wimsatt re-engineers a philosophy for human beings with all their cognitive limitations. His approaches find their starting point in the actual practices of scientists themselves, which he strongly identifies with engineering practices as the source of researchers’ solutions for dealing with a complex world. He aims to construct an understanding of scientific methodology around the central role of reduction. But he dismisses eliminative reductionism in favor of a heuristic-based realist view. Wimsatt’s world is a complex one, and this means that science needs to do away with all the absolute and simple answers, because they do not reflect the world we are living in. A complex world requires the mindset and tinkering of an engineer to uncover its reality. The appropriate response must be heuristics all the way down as we constantly seek out reliable inferences on often shifting ground. To this end, we aim for models and theories that are robust, just as engineers aim to build robust machines. And although errors occur and approaches are fallible, they allow us to continually adapt the heuristics applied and sharpen our perceptions so as to develop more refined tools for investigating and understanding the world.
ion and generalization are two processes of reasoning that have a special role in the construction of scientific theories and models. They have been important parts of the scientific method ever since the nineteenth century. A philosophical and historical analysis of scientific practices shows how abstraction and generalization found their way into the theory of the logic of science of the nineteenth-century philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Our case studies include the scientific practices of Francis Galton and John Herschel, who introduced composite photographs and graphical methods, respectively, as technologies of generalization and thereby influenced Peirce's logic of abstraction. Herschel's account of generalization is further supported by William Whewell, who was very influential on Peirce. By connecting Herschel's scientific technology of abstraction to Peirce's logical technology of abstraction-namely, diagrams-we highlight the role of judgments in scientific observation by hypostatic abstractions. We also relate Herschel's discovery-driven logic of science and Peirce's open-ended diagrammatic logic to the use of models in science. Ultimately, Peirce's theory of abstraction is a case of showing how logic applies to reality.
American Journal of Primatology, 1990
Subtitled A n Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, Hull's book is a landmark in the analysis of how science and scientists operate. It is a complex, sometimes repetitive, long, and highly detailed work that should be read by a wide audience. I will state my bias outrightafter reading much in the philosophy of science, this is the first sustained treatment by a philosopher that captures an actual understanding of what doing science is really like. Perhaps it doesn't capture all science (and Hull doesn't claim that it does), but much that is said here should elicit nods of agreement as it retails an insider's look at a significant part of the biological world of interest to readers of this journal. Ostensibly the book is about modern evolutionary systematic biology and the intense competition among three rival approaches as seen from the privileged viewpoint of a participant observer. The first part of the book is devoted to developing the historical background of the three views, introducing the major players, and recounting how the story unfolds. This part is fascinating and could almost be a long novel in which the plot stops while relevant digressions take place. But in this case the digressions are not about battles, village history, pineapples, or poisons, but the nuances, theories, and politics involved in phenetics, vicariance biogeography, sociobiology, traditional vs. transformed cladistics, and so on. And unlike a novel, it is one of the clearest, most authoritative and current sources available on modern systematic theory, giving not only the concepts but their conceptual and social antecedents. For those readers who know, through reputation or in person, the various main characters involved, the grimy details are both fascinating and disturbing. And grimy and gritty the details often are, for Hull brings in much personal information on rivalries, personal antipathies, soured friendships, liaisons of convenience, love affairs, as well as more traditional historical information on collegial relations and theoretical disagreements. Hull apologizes for this but considers it necessary, and I agree. Hull was an insider in that he became involved in systematic biology in the 1960s and eventually served as President of the Society for Systematic Zoology. Systematic Zoology is not one of the large and prestigious societies in science writ large. But its members, and the issues they discuss, are highly visible: Scientific American articles on whether dinosaurs should be classified as birds and not reptiles and Natural History articles on evolutionary theory are common venues; Science, Nature, and other mainline interdisciplinary journals also frequently field topics on taxonomic philosophy and evolution. The scientific issues being contested here essentially constitute the Old Guard evolutionary synthesis of the 40s (Simpson and Mayr the most prominent) being challenged by newer approaches self-described as both more objective and useful: