33 research outputs found
Shifting Attention From Theory to Practice in Philosophy of Biology
Traditional approaches in philosophy of biology focus attention on biological concepts, explanations, and theories, on evidential support and inter-theoretical relations. Newer approaches shift attention from concepts to conceptual practices, from theories to practices of theorizing, and from theoretical reduction to reductive retooling. In this article, I describe the shift from theory-focused to practice-centered philosophy of science and explain how it is leading philosophers to abandon fundamentalist assumptions associated with traditional approaches in philosophy of science and to embrace scientific pluralism. This article comes in three parts, each illustrating the shift from theory-focused to practice-centered epistemology. The first illustration shows how shifting philosophical attention to conceptual practice reveals how molecular biologists succeed in identifying coherent causal strands within systems of bewildering complexity. The second illustration suggests that analyzing how a multiplicity of alternative models function in practice provides an illuminating approach for understanding the nature of theoretical knowledge in evolutionary biology. The third illustration demonstrates how framing reductionism in terms of the reductive retooling of practice offers an informative perspective for understanding why putting DNA at the center of biological research has been incredibly productive throughout much of biology. Each illustration begins by describing how traditional theory-focused philosophical approaches are laden with fundamentalist assumptions and then proceeds to show that shifting attention to practice undermines these assumptions and motivates a philosophy of scientific pluralism
Thirty years of Biology & Philosophy: philosophy of which biology?
Which domains of biology do philosophers of biology primarily study? The fact that
philosophy of biology has been dominated by an interest for evolutionary biology is
widely admitted, but it has not been strictly demonstrated. Here I analyse the topics of
all the papers published in Biology & Philosophy, just as the journal celebrates its
thirtieth anniversary. I then compare the distribution of biological topics in Biology &
Philosophy with that of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science of the USA, focusing on the recent period 2003-2015. This comparison
reveals a significant mismatch between the distributions of these topics. I examine
plausible explanations for that mismatch. Finally, I argue that many biological topics
underrepresented in philosophy of biology raise important philosophical issues and
should therefore play a more central role in future philosophy of biology
Modeling Morality
Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention
from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research
program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling
questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations,
for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor.
Their use, however, has sometimes been deemed as useless, trivial and inadequate. The role of models in the science of morality has been vastly underappreciated. This omission shall be remedied here, offering a much more positive
picture on the contributions modelers made to our understanding of morality