Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
The idea that there is parity among genes and other elements takes several subtle forms in philosophical discussions and I will not analyze them here.
- 2.
I say “largely” because often in Eukaryotes, differences in other molecules, including splicing agents, also determine actual differences in polypeptides.
- 3.
See Waters (2007) for a detailed analysis.
- 4.
A few biologists have written on this issue and drawn conclusions similar to those of philosophers (e.g. see Portin 1993; Fogle 2000). Stotz et al. (2004) have put the question “what is a gene?” to biologists through surveys, keeping track of how biologists in different groups (for example different fields, of different ages, etc.) answer this question. They have explored how biologists answer the question in the context of different kinds of examples. As I read the empirical results, their study indicates that biologists are all over the place. But I have reservations about drawing philosophical conclusions from such studies. See Waters (2004a, b) for a critique of using surveys to analyze scientific concepts.
- 5.
I am using the term partition in the set theoretical sense of a division into elements that do not overlap.
- 6.
To be more precise, I believe we should be asking two questions: (1) “what concepts of the gene are at work in successful biological practices?” (2) “what concepts of the gene help us understand the success of biological investigations without inflating the knowledge that makes this success possible?”
- 7.
For example, a symposium at the most recent Philosophy of Science Association meeting examined experimental modeling in evolutionary biology (Waters et al. 2012).
- 8.
- 9.
Okasha claims that “unlike most formal descriptions of the evolutionary process, it [Price’s equation] rests on no contingent biological assumptions, so always holds true” (p. 19). He also claims that the Price formalism “subsumes all more specific models as special cases” (p. 3). But he contradicts this latter claim later in his book, and there is good reason to think that the kind of toolbox theorizing I am advocating with respect to model types MLS1 and MLS2 applies at the level of the Price equation and its formal rivals such as contextual analysis (see Waters 2010).
- 10.
I thank Marc Ereshefsky for reminding me that theory-focused philosophers of biology have done a good job critiquing the fundamentalist conception of natural kinds and that they have developed promising alternatives for understanding kinds of entities.
- 11.
Maxwell (manuscript), Cartwright et al. (1995), Cartwright (1999), Suárez and Cartwright (2008) and Wimsatt (2007) offer ideas about theorizing similar to the one I am advancing here and also use the “toolbox” term and metaphor.
- 12.
Some recent accounts of reduction frame reduction in different ways, but still with the emphasis on theoretical and/or explanatory relations. For example, Hüttemann and Love (2011) couch it in terms of explanations in which an outcome described at a higher level (explandum) is explained by earlier states described at lower level(s). This article illustrates that focusing on the theories and explanations does not necessarily presuppose fundamentalism, and that paying attention to theoretical and explanatory practices undermines the fundamentalist ideals.
- 13.
- 14.
Many of the points in this section are developed in more detail in Waters (2008a).
- 15.
Not all reductionists accept the layer-cake image (e.g., Weber 2005), and some antireductionists seem more interested in advancing holism than multileveled holism (e.g., various contributors to Oyama et al. 2001). Nevertheless, many philosophers cling to the idea that biology is organized into separate sciences, each of which is focused on a particular level of organization.
- 16.
- 17.
Debates in philosophy of science are sometimes framed as disagreements about “the aim” of science. For example, van Fraassen (1980) characterizes his disagreement with scientific realists as centering on the aim of science. I reject the idea that there is something called “science” that has a single aim.
- 18.
See Waters (2004b) for an elaboration of this account.
- 19.
As in the case of classical genetics (see Waters 2004b), investigators carry out their work on model organisms that have been adapted for laboratory practice.
- 20.
Given the possibility of redundant pathways to the development of the neurons, the results did not prove that ß-spectrin has no role in the growth if these neuronal extensions, but the results did show that the role was not essential.
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Waters, C.K. (2014). Shifting Attention from Theory to Practice in Philosophy of Biology. In: Galavotti, M., Dieks, D., Gonzalez, W., Hartmann, S., Uebel, T., Weber, M. (eds) New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04382-1_9
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