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Are Pictures Really Necessary? The Case of Sewell Wright’s “Adaptive Landscapes”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse*
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

Biologists are remarkably visual people. Yet, the classics of logical empiricism never raised the general question of scientific illustration. Moreover, one suspects that the silence was, if anything, actively hostile. People did not talk about biological illustration, because they did not judge it to be part of “real science”. This enterprise produces statements or propositions, ideally embedded in a formal system. It may be about the real world, but it is not in any sense of the real world, in being a copy or mirror image. Philosophers recognized that regretfully human weakness demanded the visual. But it was judged at best a prop. (See, for instance, Braithwaite 1953, Hempel 1965, and Bunge 1967; although see also Achinstein 1968. The best discussion of scientific illustration that I know is Rudwick 1976.)

Type
Part III. Biology: The Non-Propositional Side
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 62 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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