New insights into the nature of science: What does Hull's evolutionary epistemology teach us?
✍ Scribed by William Bechtel
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 1988
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 553 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0169-3867
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Having tried myself on a couple occasions to employ an evolutionary perspective to understand scientific development (Bechtel, 1984, 1987), became rather skeptical of its utility. My skepticism was not due to the objections of the critics of evolutionary epistemology to the effect that the differences between biological evolution and the development of science are sufficiently great to undercut any useful comparison. The existence of differences does not negate the value of an analogy for the details of one process do not have to be exactly the same as those of another for us to gain insights about one from the other. Rather, I have become disillusioned because the comparison did not seem to yield fruitful results. I was not learning more about science by comparing it to biological evolution.
When a technique fails to produce results, the problem may not be due to the technique; it may be that the user does not know how to use the technique most effectively. If anyone is accomplished in using the evolutionary perspective to study processes in science, it is David Hull. He has attempted systematically to apply an evolutionary perspective to particular episodes in the development of science and has carried out the enterprise in far greater detail than anyone else. What we see in the target article are some of the fruits of that endeavorinsights into the character of science that stem from his attempt to understand science by viewing it from an evolutionary perspective. 2 Hull has identified characteristics of the development of science that have been overlooked by theorists who have not adopted the evolutionary perspective. This gives me new reason to take the analogy seriously. In what follows I will discuss, from the perspective of my recent work on the history of biochemistry and cell biology, some further dimensions of these characteristics of science to which Hull has drawn our attention.
1. THE ROLE OF SCIENTISTS AS INTERACTORS
Hull presents his evolutionary account in terms of four concepts: interactor, replicator, selection, and lineage. Lineages are produced by selection differentially extinguishing and promoting interactors, which causes the differential proliferation of replicators. When he applies this framework to science, Hull construes the replicators as the "elements of the substantive content of sciencebeliefs about the goals of science, the proper ways to go about realizing these goals, problems and their possible solutions, modes of representation, accumulated data reports, and so on" (p. 140). Although like Hull I will use the term "ideas" to stand for this class of entities, it should be emphasized that Hull includes far more than scientific hypotheses and theories, the usual focus of discussions in philosophy of science. When one examines the modes of transmission in science (e.g., book chapters