Experimental philosophy of biology: notes from the field
Section snippets
Introduction: experimental philosophy of biology and the ‘biohumanities’
A central tenet underlying the work to be described here is that philosophy and science are not clearly separated activities, but aspects of a single inquiry into nature. They are distinguished primarily by the questions they ask, rather than by any restrictions on their ‘proper’ methods. The new field of ‘experimental philosophy’ (X-phi) pays tribute to this ‘continuity thesis’ by bringing empirical work to bear on philosophical questions. Its practitioners have not lost their identity as
Representing genes
The gene’s conceptual variation is the most salient feature of its 100-year history. Philosophical analyses have attempted to both describe different concepts of the gene in use by different biologists and at different times, and to prescribe better ones (Waters, 2004). Many philosophers and historians have analyzed this variation in terms of a tension between two aspects of the gene, aspects that have been characterized in several, not necessarily consistent ways:
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An abstract unit of
The philosopher as a scientist
One motivation for the Representing Genes study was to transcend the limitations of traditional conceptual analysis. There is a tradeoff between the intimate knowledge of part of the science through interaction with particular scientists and the bias of your interpretation of the whole field. Perhaps as a result, philosophers typically produce competing analyses of scientific concepts, and traditional conceptual analysis too often ends with the ‘dull thud of conflicting intuitions’. Such
‘Conceptual speciation events’ and the ‘epistemic niche’5
The gene was originally defined in the light of the hybridization techniques available to early geneticists. In the absence of any knowledge about the molecular basis of genetics this early ‘instrumental gene’ was a hypothetical entity, an intervening variable between the phenotypes of the parental generation and the distribution of phenotypes in following generations. As new techniques became available and new questions about the structural nature of the gene pressing, the gene was redefined.
A postgenomic gene concept?
Just as finer work may require more specialized tools, it may be that molecular geneticists are now confronting problems for which the classical molecular gene concept no longer proves useful. For instance, scientists today want to understand how regulated genome expression leads from a ridiculously small number of genes to the explosion of gene products that create and maintain higher organism, especially humans. This will likely require a more modest gene concept in which the structural and
Conclusion
This paper describes empirical/experimental studies in the philosophy of biology in general as part of the ‘biohumanities’. This field comprises four different but related aims: constructive science criticism, creating alternative visions of biology, critical science communication, and, simply, understanding biology as an object of natural knowledge in its own right. In Section 3 I outlined how experimental philosophy methods can contribute to this kind of research. Section 4 and 5 demonstrated
Acknowledgement
This material presented in this paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants #0217567 and #0323496, awarded to the author and Paul Griffiths.
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