The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Marjorie Grene
and David Depew
The Philosophy of
Biology: An Episodic History
Cambridge University Press, 2004
Chapter 12
The
Philosophy of Biology and the Philosophy of Science
In concluding our retrospective of the relations
between philosophy and biology past and present, we may ask what the emergence
of a philosophy of biology can contribute to the philosophy of science in
general. What can the study of biology
teach us if we take it either as our model field or as a model for our field?
There have so far been two major movements in recent
philosophy of science. First, there was
the so-called received view, initially logical positivism, rechristened logical
empiricism. Taking fundamental physics,
or a caricature of it, as its model, it separated the process of discovery
(which it ignored) from the context of justification. Within the latter context, it aimed at a
logical reconstruction of science, a science that rigorously followed a single hypothetico-deductive method, and that was to issue in the
utopian structure of a unified science. In reaction, sociologists, and even some
philosophers of science, have practiced a sociological deconstruction of
science, which has left that family of disciplines with no claim whatsoever to
epistemic justification. For the first
school, science, with its sacrosanct method, stands serenely outside society,
or else deigns to direct it by applying its superior procedure. For the second, science is reduced to
politics: In effect, there is only society, no science.
What if we come to the philosophy of science through
reflections on biology rather than physics, or some abstract dream of physics,
as the received view used to do, or in preference to taking as our model for
philosophy a rather naive sociology? From
the present writers’ perspective, we have a chance, or so we hope, of
developing a more fruitful approach to the philosophy of science in general,
what we might call an “ecological-historical” view.
348
Admittedly, we are not the first to ask what biology
can teach the philosophy of science. As
we noted in Chapter 10, some latter-day defenders of the once received view
have stated contrasting positions in this respect. Believing that a unity of science must be
possible, Kenneth Schaffner hopes that biology, for
all its present resistance, will finally enter the utopian land he envisages (Schaffner 1993). Alexander
Rosenberg, sharing the same ideal, but entertaining no such hope, finds biology
a set of merely practical endeavors, which exhibit the unfortunate disunity of
science (Rosenburg 1994).
There have also been seemingly more positive
applications of biological lessons to the philosophy of science. There is evolutionary epistemology, for
example, which purports to naturalize the theory of knowledge by explaining the
growth of scientific knowledge in terms of the theory of natural selection. This sounds tempting. Life evolves, science
evolves, so why not apply the principles of biological evolution to the development
of science? Yet the situation, as we see
it, is not so simple. While, as we shall
emphasize, we believe that investigations in the philosophy of science need to
be grounded in its history, our questions do not concern simply a matter of
what succeeded what; they have an epistemological bent. We want to understand what scientific
knowledge claims amount to in the context of this or that discipline, or in the
context of a developing discipline, rather than simply chronicling the relative
frequencies of these or those slightly differing assertions, succeeding one
another by a kind of unnatural selection (see Hahlweg
and Hooker 1989).
There is indeed a weak form of so-called evolutionary
epistemology, which simply points out that we have come into existence as
animals finding our way around the world, and taking scientific knowledge to be
a subset of such varieties of way-finding. The slogan one of us is fond of repeating, and
which we will repeat again shortly - “all knowledge is orientation” - echoes
this sentiment. But the stronger form of
evolutionary epistemology, which attempts to identify survival by natural
selection with the history of science, seems to us to ignore entirely the
epistemological aspect of our subject.
David Hull, although he rejects the label
“epistemologist,” takes a position allied to that of the strict evolutionary
epistemologists. He has developed a
general theory of selection, which, he argues, applies to such diverse areas as
biological evolution, immunization, operant learning, and the history of
science (Hull l988a; Hull 2001, especially Chapters 3
and 4). Together with two colleagues, an immunologist
and a behavioristic psychologist, he offers the
following definition:
We define selection as repeated cycles
of replication, variation, and environmental interaction so structured that
environmental interaction causes replication to be differential. The net effect is the evolution of the
lineages produced by the process.
Hull, Langman, and Glenn in Hull 2001, p. 53
That’s all very well as far as it goes, but what does
it tell us about science in particular? Yes,
there is some kind of selection process there too, but how does that help us
understand the odd, complicated history that started somewhere in Western
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or maybe in the fourteenth,
depending on your point of view?
In an essay entitled “The Trials and Tribulations of Selectionist Explanation,” Ronald Amundson
asks, not just when there is selection, but when selection has explanatory
force. Taking Darwinian selection as his
model, he enumerates three “central conditions” that need to be fulfilled if
selection is not only to exist, but to explain some biological, psychological,
or social process. There must be (1)
richness of variation, (2) non-directedness of variation, and (3) a
non-purposive sorting mechanism that results in the persistence of those
variations better suited to the needs of the organism or species in question in
its particular environment. Only where
these conditions are met, Amundson argues, is the
invocation of selection explanatory rather than merely metaphorical. Darwin, he reminds us, “did not simply say
that nature works as if there were an intelligent breeder selecting between
variants. He said that
there was no such breeder - that the forces of nature produced their riches
without prior resources of direction and foresight” (Amundson
1989, p. 430). Selectionist explanations may hold, Amundson
admits, for the immune system or for operant conditioning - two of the examples
that would also be put forward by Hull et al. But what about science?
Here, surely, conditions (2) and (3)
fail: The variations in that case as well as the sorting process do surely appear
to involve some conceptual, and hence purposive -
intentional as well as intensional - components. To be sure, Hull has tried to give an account
of scientific development that seems to eliminate such factors. He takes “curiosity” for granted as an element
in our makeup, and then analyzes the activity of scientists, or scientific
communities, in terms of the two further factors of “credit” and “checking.” Are these agencies undirected? In any case, with no account of conceptual
350
input, let alone of the nature and power of
experiment, or of the relation of conceptual to experimental moves in science,
this story wears very thin. In one
essay, Hull does invoke, though somewhat lamely, considerations of “truth”
(Hull 2001, Chapter 8). But this, again,
is rather vague and general. Amundson is surely correct in maintaining that calling the
history of science a selective process explains very little. One way to
put it is to point out that selective explanations are purely causal, whereas
science involves reasons as well as causes (see Donohue 1990).
Given, then, that we find a selectionist
approach to science less than satisfactory, what alternative insights can we
suggest if we start our reflections from biology rather than the “exact” sciences?
First, if we take the biological sciences as our model
for the philosophy of science, we have a better chance of accepting a realist
point of view as fundamental for the philosophy of science. For the present writers, realism is a
principle. It is not something to be
argued for, but where we start. The
objects of study of physicists, theoretical or experimental, may lie far from
ordinary experience. A physicist such as
Mach in Vienna or Wigner in Princeton may proclaim
that he is only making mathematical constructions on the basis of his
sensations. In fact, the major tradition
of the past century in philosophy of science was founded on this Viennese
theme. Even when it was discovered that
there are no pure observations - that all observation is “theory-laden,” as
they put it - the theoretician was still floating on a surface of little points
of atomic or isolated sensations. In
this way, the problem of “scientific realism” was reduced to the question of the
reality of theoretical entities, atoms, electrons, quarks, and so on. The world as environment - even the
impoverished world of Newton, according to which God probably formed matter out
of hard, solid, impenetrable particles - no longer existed. In contrast, it is difficult for biologists to
deny the reality of living things. Given
this insight, moreover, they can more easily recognize that they are themselves
living things among living things. It is
true that molecular biologists, too, work, like physicists or chemists, far
enough from ordinary life. But even they
have to cultivate the organisms on which they do their research: from Arabidopsis
or Dictostelium to pine trees or
pigs, and so on and so on. Without
adopting the science of Aristotle, we are returning here in some sense to the
Aristotelian starting point of science. We
find ourselves as living things in an environment that (up to now, at any rate)
has permitted life. We find ourselves,
too, among beings that are born, mature, grow old, and die. In short, we
find ourselves from the beginning in a real
world. Although at least one great
biologist, Sewall Wright, adopted an extreme idealism
as his own philosophy, biologists in general do not habitually deny the
existence of their object of study, nor, by implication, of themselves as
students of them. Science is - or,
better, sciences (in the plural) are - communally organized efforts of real
people to find their way in some section of the real world. Of course they don’t always succeed, and they
never come to an endpoint beyond which there is no further inquiry, but that
doesn’t undercut the reality both of their objects and of their efforts to
understand them.
In short, what we are trying to understand, as
philosophers, is the life of science: how scientific practices originate
and continue as epistemic enterprises. In this context, perhaps there is some
biological discipline we can take as our model. Ethology seems the
obvious choice. True, philosophy is not
an experimental science. Indeed, in
terms of the English sense of “science,” no branch of philosophy, including the
philosophy of science, is itself a science. Philosophy consists in reflections, more or
less systematic, on the structure or functions of certain disciplines or
certain human interests. And the
philosophy of science in particular tries to reflect on the aims, the
successes, the failures of the practitioners of the
sciences. That is, of course, what the ethologists do with their animals.
Granted, in our case - in the case of the philosophy
of science - it is profoundly enculturated animals
that we are observing: ourselves, or rather, a small group among ourselves. It will be asked: Why not anthropology as our
model? There are two reasons to prefer ethology. On the one
hand, the sort of anthropology that has been used in the study of science is
too externalizing an anthropology to take account of
the sciences as scientific. True, that
is not the only style that exists in anthropology, but it is the style that has
been dominant in social constructivism.
On the other hand - and this is a more substantive
reason - we must insist again that it is the life of the sciences we are
trying to understand. The logical
skeleton that was the ideal of the old orthodoxy in the philosophy of science
had no connection with that reality. In
our view, social constructivism offers no better choice. It is true that the sciences, like all human
vocations, are social enterprises. But
the Hobbesian vision that characterizes one sort at
least of social constructionism is too far removed
from a reasonable conception of the sciences as special segments of human life,
segments in which the enterprise of learning and
352
knowing for their own sake is central. And in general the emphasis on “construction,”
with its stress on the artificiality of language as the carrier of our
practices, not only distances the scientists from their objects, with
catastrophic results, but, unless qualified in ways we will mention later,
prejudices questions about the very nature and scope of learning and knowing. For these reasons, it is in the efforts of a
living being to understand the activities of other living beings that we want
to look for a model for the practice of the philosophy of science.
Consider a particular example. Deborah Gordon, who
studies the behavior of harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex
barbatus), has described the way she carries on
her research in the field (Gordon 1992). When she started, Gordon tells us, she saw
only little bodies moving pell-mell on the ground. Little by little she succeeded in recognizing
certain distinct patterns of behavior among the ants. She observed patrollers, who look for sources
of nourishment; foragers, who bring food; guardians of the ant-hill; and trash
collectors. Similarly, the philosopher
of science is trying to understand the formations of research workers in a
given discipline, the task they undertake, the goals that define those undertakings.
And, continuing our analogy, we should
note that Gordon not only studies the behavior of those particular ants; she
observes at the same time the history of the colony, which does not correspond
exactly to the behavior of individuals. In the philosophy of science, too, it is not
only the history of the individual as research worker that we want to
understand; it is the history and structure of the discipline itself: what has
been called in the Canguilhem school,
“l’institution de la science,” the establishment of
(a) science.
However, if we find in this analogy a useful lesson
for the philosophy of science, we certainly do not want to deny the great
differences that exist between the two practices. Trying to understand the life of a population
of ants is far from being the same thing as trying to understand the activities
of a population of human beings. In the
latter case, we have to do with our peers, our kind, who are
enmeshed, as we are, in language, in culture, in history. And up to a certain point, we can cultivate
our imagination with the purpose of entering, by a kind of Humean
sympathy, into a tradition that is not entirely our own. We are trying to understand what Ludwig Fleck
called a different thought style, to practice what he called comparative
epistemology. In this sense, it is true
that the philosopher of science is more like an anthropologist than an ethologist. Nevertheless,
we prefer the ethological analogy. For,
as we have already said, the anthropology that was used in at least one
famous case of the sociology of science
appears to suffer from a barbarous reductivism. (The case we have in mind is
Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory
Life; a more recent instance of the same genre is Steven Shapin’s Social History of Truth [Latour and Woolgar 1979; Shapin 1994]).
Further, as we have also said already, but it bears
repeating: We must insist on the fact that when, as philosophers of science, we
study a scientific discipline, or an episode in the history of science, or a
particular variety of scientific knowledge, it is the ongoing practice, the
life, of science that we want to describe, analyze, and understand. It is neither an abstract logical formulation
that we are looking for, nor a caricature of scientific practice as a pure Hobbesian war of all against all. What we are aiming at is a multidimensional
analysis that displays the complex and subtle elements that constitute science,
or rather a science. Again, science is a
family (in the Wittgensteinian sense) of occupations
of certain people and certain groups that have the common aim of seeking the
truth, but of seeking it in a particular domain and by specific methods that we
recognize in some sense or other as “scientific.” Knowledge is a form of orientation, finding
one’s way in an environment. For men and
women of science, that means orientation in a discipline, a language, a type of
laboratory, a style of experimentation, and so on. There is no single, all-inclusive formula for
such activities. It is a question of
immersing oneself in the detailed history of some particular scientific
enterprise, and, it is to be hoped, gaining philosophical insight from
that study.
Richard Burian’s study of
the work of Jean Brachet may serve as an example of
this kind of work (Burian 1997). Burian examines in
some detail the exploratory work of Brachet and his
colleagues on the localization of nucleic acids and part of the pathway that
led him and his coworkers to consider the problem of protein synthesis. Burian writes:
The tools he devised, appropriated, and
adapted, were put to different uses in the service of a variety of problems,
explored in parallel. In all of these
studies, he sought to employ a wide range of organisms and the widest possible
range of techniques in order to provide a basis for reconciling the findings
obtained and for achieving broad understanding of the process in question.
Burian 1997, p. 32
This wide-ranging style of experimentation, based in biochemistry and
biochemical embryology, and using techniques from a variety of sources
354
on a variety of organisms, contrasts
strikingly with those of the more celebrated pioneers of molecular biology, who
“typically employed tools imported from physics in combination with the new
methods of genetic analysis applied to microorganisms” (Burian
1997, p. 39). Yet, by difficult and
devious paths, these different styles of investigation converged on the same
entities. Brachet’s
methods themselves shed important light on one variety of scientific practice,
in which problems and techniques from a number of disciplines are brought to
bear on a developing field of investigation. But this story also suggests a broader lesson.
Comparing Brachet’s
research with that of other workers engaged in the same search, Burian observes:
The very fact that work in three such
different styles (and with aims as diverse) as Brachet’s,
Crick’s, and Zamecnik’s could be brought into concordance
in about one decade serves as an important marker of the mobilization of the
entities and phenomena in the enormous domain covered by these three
distinctive research programs. One of
the most important tasks in the philosophy of biology - indeed, the philosophy
of science generally - is to understand how we achieve concordance in the interpretations
of the findings of workers who, in [Hans Jörg] Rheinberger’s terminology, work with such different
‘epistemic objects’ as those that preoccupied these three key figures. It is in handling such topics as this that the
philosophy of experiment will find its liberation from the excessive
theory-centrism, now waning, of recent philosophy of science.
Burian 1997, pp. 40-41
Similar case-based philosophizing can also be found
elsewhere. Almost classically by now,
there is what Fleck did with the Wassermann test, deriving from that history
his concepts of thought style and thought collective. Hans Jorg Rheinberger bases his philosophy of experimental systems
and epistemic things on a detailed study of protein synthesis in Paul Zamecnik’s laboratory. On a more general scale, but still through the
study of particular cases, Jean Gayon also furnishes
philosophical insights through his account of the destiny of Darwin’s hypothesis
of natural selection (Gayon 1998). In such studies, history is fundamental. Just what were the disciplinary backgrounds, interests, techniques involved in each case must be
carefully described and analyzed. Even
when the activity under study is contemporary, it is still history, like
Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War - or better perhaps, especially for
readers of this book, like “natural history” from Aristotle to
Cuvier - that is, the study of life styles in
their concrete distinctness from one another. [1]
So far, so good. But to say that our work is like that of an ethologist is not enough. Ethologists have
different ways of approaching their subject matter. Some have been radically reductive in their
methods, like Fraenkel and Gunn (Frankel and Gunn 1940).
It is simply motions they claim to be
studying. As we have indicated, it is
more than such purely externalist description we are after. On the other hand, there are ethologists, such as Cheney and Seyfarth,
who want to penetrate if they can “inside the mind of another species” (Cheney
and Seyfarth 1990). Following Thomas Nagel’s famous inquiry, “What
is it like to be a bat?” they want if they can to penetrate the subjectivity of
their object of study, in this case vervet monkeys
(Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; see Nagel 1974). A similar intention underlies the work of
Donald Griffin, whom Cheney and Seyfarth cite
approvingly (Griffin 1984; 1992). Moving
from a vain hope for total objectivity, such writers turn to a search for
subjectivity, for a “secret inner something,” to set against purely external,
or purely material, appearances. However that seems to us an equally vain hope - Cheney and Seyfarth certainly admit its difficulty - and, when carried
to extremes, a foolish one. Thus
Griffin, for example, wants bees to be conscious of their directed
food-searching, as we are when we go to the supermarket. Surely the evolution of the central nervous
system has made some difference in the nature of animals’ experience.
In short, if we are not looking for pure locomotor descriptions, neither is it inner feels we are
after in our reflections on the sciences. However, there is, we believe, a third, more
promising, way to go. Another name for ethology
is behavioral ecology (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990, p.
10). We are trying to understand certain
ways of coping in, and with, certain environments. If we read it in terms of the principles of
ecological psychology, Cheney and Seyfarth’s
subtitle, “How Monkeys See the World,” may suggest a direction for such investigations.
Traditionally, “seeing,” and other
perceptual systems, have been described in terms of isolated, private
sensations from which we somehow infer hypotheses about what is out there
beyond us. The relatively new discipline
of ecological psychology takes a different approach. [2]
1. Clearly there is no reason why
careful case studies should be limited to biology. For example, Friedrich Steinle
considers Charles Dufay’s work in electricity as a
case of exploratory experimentation similar to the Brachet
case treated by Burian (Steinle
2001).
2. The basic text is J. J. Gibson 1979.
356
Whatever any animal perceives entails three equally
essential aspects. First, there are
always things or events occurring in its environment. Again, we are considering real animals in real
situations. No science fiction or
possible world nonsense about it. Second,
there is always information in that environment that the animal has the
capacity to pick up. This takes the form
of invariants: constancies within change which the animal’s perceptual systems
have evolved to be able to pick up. On
the perceiver’s side, such information pick-up consists in a process of
differentiation within a structured context. It is important to stress this feature. On the older view of perception, it was a
question of somehow associating together small, meaningless sensations. In terms of the ecological approach, on the
contrary, perceivers, from early infancy on, are understood to be discriminating
between, or differentiating, distinguishable features within their environment.
Third, there are affordances, opportunities the
environment affords the perceiver, or dangers it presents. It may offer the chance of a mate, the threat
of a predator, and the like. “Affordance”
is a coinage of J. J. Gibson’s, which, he says, he
substituted for the term “value,” with its subjective connotations (J. J.
Gibson 1966, p. 285). It is not a
question, as Köhler put it, of “the place of value in
a world of facts.” The world itself exhibits
values, or meanings: relations between perceivers and features of their
environments that offer them goals to seek or avoid. An animal’s world is, from the beginning, a
world full of meanings, and evolution has endowed it with the potentialities to
respond to such a world.
In other words, there is a real world in which the
animal finds itself, and to the constitution of which it in turn contributes
through its activity. This world is
structured: In the flux of events there are constants, invariants, stable
proportions that characterize for the terrestrial animal, for example, the
ground, the horizon, and so on. Again,
it is these invariants that constitute the information that the animal picks up
in its environment. And it is these same
invariants that allow the animal in its turn to perceive affordances - that is,
the advantages and the dangers that its environment presents to it. [3]
This situation exists for all animals. However, there are also peculiarities, so far
as we can tell, in the human situation. Although perception as such is direct, there
are also three kinds of indirect perception mediated
3. We are here following an account by Eleanor J.
Gibson (E. J. Gibson 1983). See also
Gibson and Pick 2000.
by our cultural inventions. (They are nevertheless still to be found in
the real world, in nature; there is only one world, within which culture
arises.) These three inventions are tools,
language, and the use of pictures. From birth, the perceptions of the infant,
then of the child and of the adult are saturated by these human and cultural
ingredients. But the fundamental structure of perception remains the foundation of these
accomplishments - and, as we shall argue, if not the foundation, at least the
analogue, of all knowledge (see J. J. Gibson 1979).
What lessons does this new theory of perception offer
to the philosophy of science? We believe
there are three.
First, the ecological approach assists us in
maintaining our realist position. We can
definitively finish with the phenomenalism that has
haunted the philosophy of science since its inception. We can finally forget the picture of Mach
counting his sensations, and try to understand the situation of scientific workers
as engaged, each in his or her discipline, in an ongoing dialogue with reality.
[4] We need to see ourselves, and the scientists
among us, each in his or her own discipline or emerging discipline, as live, if
enculturated animals in a complex, ongoing environment,
full of meanings, whether soothing or startling, beckoning or alarming. The traditional theory of perception set the
observer, let alone the thinker, apart from his milieu, isolated with a
congeries of meaningless sensations that had somehow to be correlated with
expectations in a constructed, perhaps fictional, “out-there.” This has surely contributed a great deal to
the difficulty of understanding scientific practice and formulating a more
concrete and more adequate picture of such practice.
Second, if we adopt the ecological point of view, we
find that perception plays an important part even in our more cerebral, or more
enculturated, knowledge. Consider the three categories of indirect perception
that characterize human knowledge: tools, language, and the use of pictures. Up to the beginning of the computer age, tools
served chiefly to improve perception. Hooke looked at his cells, and Leeuwenhoeck at his little animals. Physicists still have to look at the traces in
a Wilson cloud chamber. We never wholly
escape the basic need
4. We owe this expression to
Dr. Frank Quinn of the Virginia Tech mathematics department. Michael Polanyi
spoke of the scientist’s confidence of being “in contact with reality” (Polanyi 1958). The
concept of a dialogue further implies something like what Polanyi
called “indwelling.” The language in
such a dialogue will itself be partly established, partly as yet developing.
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of picking up information that allows us to
perceive the affordances of our environment, be it in a laboratory or a field. Perception is always the fundamental
knowledge on which other knowledge rests. Depiction clearly also involves perception,
if, as J. J. Gibson, describes it, a kind of double vision: We are always aware both of picture and frame
(J. J. Gibson 1979).
The case of language seems at first sight more
difficult, since there is a long tradition that separates language from
reality. Yet language does not separate
us radically from the essential process of perception. Rather it enriches it; naming draws our
attention to objects. Moreover, language
itself has to be perceived: heard, seen, or in the case of the blind, touched. It is true that when the child begins to
speak, it enters into a world not previously known, and from that moment its
perceptions are caught up in its linguistic life. This is an infinitely subtle relation, and
difficult to analyze. But it does not
remove the foundation of all human activity in the perceptual processes by
which we conduct ourselves in the world, at once cultural and natural, that
surrounds us.
Finally - and this is the most significant implication
of the ecological approach for the philosophy of science - the three components
of the perceptual situation hold as well, analogically, for more cerebral kinds
of knowledge. The term “perception” is
used metaphorically for forms of insight other than strict sense perception,
and with good reason. In his induction
into any discipline, the student finds himself in a new world, surrounded by
events and objects formerly unfamiliar. What
he learns, in this new ambiance, is to pick up information in the form of
invariants, and with their help to perceive the affordances - the meanings -
available in this new environment. A
beginning medical student, observing an X-ray, sees only lines; he learns to
read these lines as an infected lung or a fractured limb or whatever. This is still a question of sense perception;
but a similar process of increasing awareness marks the initiation into any new
discipline, or sub-discipline. There are
objects and events from whose constancies over change we pick up information
that allows us to grasp formerly hidden meanings within the new world we have
now come to inhabit.
This is very like a child’s perceptual learning -
mediated by language as well as tools and depictions - except that with
scientific exploration, the process remains open-ended. While some features within the discipline
become routine, it is the still not-so-clear features the scientist is always
groping for. As François Jacob put it,
“Unpredictability is in the nature of the scientific enterprise. If what is to be found is really new,
then it is by definition unknown in advance. There is no way of telling where a particular
line of research will lead” (Jacob 1982, p. 67). There is no single, over-all algorithm for
such a process; styles of investigation will differ with the context.
In every discipline, however, or as Rheinberger puts it, within every experimental system,
there will be some procedures, some entities, that have become sufficiently
established to serve as technical tools in the next stage of the investigation,
while other entities or relations are still unclear. Rheinberger calls
the upshot of this process “the production of epistemic things” (Rheinberger 1997). That
is a puzzling phrase, since we usually think of scientists as discovering
things, not making them. But what they
make, presumably, are objects of knowledge: When we seize on the meaning of a
phenomenon previously unknown, we are making into an object (for us) what was
previously at most a shadow, foreshadowed in our search, but not “objectified.”
In a way, this is a Kantian insight,
stressing the role of the knower in knowledge, but certainly without the sweep
of the Kantian principles. Again, there
is no overall rationale to be found here; we are restricted in every case to a
given historical context, in a way that goes far beyond the dreams - or better,
the nightmares - of the sage of Konigsberg. Still, through careful case studies, we can
gain insights into the ongoing practices of the sciences in ways that are
philosophically revealing. Abandoning
the goal of a grand overall synthetic view of science, or of “the scientific
method,” we can strive, like scientists though in a different style, to find
ourselves, as we hope, engaged in a dialogue with reality.
Moreover, from careful case studies and carefully
limited generalizations gained from comparing them, we can gain insights into
the ongoing practices of the sciences that are philosophically revealing. To take an example from an earlier chapter, we
found Cuvier insisting that only the careful study of
each animal for its own sake was worth pursuing, whereas his colleague Geoffroy thought the search for large underlying
generalities would set comparative anatomy on a new and more fruitful path. Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century,
their opposing theses were taken as complementary rather than contradictory
models for biologists’ work. Contemporary
investigations such as those of Burian or Rheinberger, which we have mentioned, also illustrate the
variety of differing experimental systems, as well the possible interactions
among them. Such interactions can be
fruitfully studied without the old insistence on an ultimate unity of science
of a monolithic and reductive sort. The
growth of new disciplines also illustrates such interactions,
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as, for example, in the current development of bio-informatics, which combines the insights and methods of cell and molecular biology, mathematics and computer science, and statistics to achieve an understanding of gene structure and function that biologists would not have attained without the help of their neighbors - who in turn must learn something of the material their expertise is called in to interpret.
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