Abstract
Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings is about new approaches to many of the big topics in philosophy of science today, but with a very different take. To begin with, we are urged to reject the received Cartesian-Laplacean myths: Descartes’ certainty and Laplace’s computational omniscience. Instead, Wimsatt re-engineers a philosophy for human beings with all their cognitive limitations. His approaches find their starting point in the actual practices of scientists themselves, which he strongly identifies with engineering practices as the source of researchers’ solutions for dealing with a complex world. He aims to construct an understanding of scientific methodology around the central role of reduction. But he dismisses eliminative reductionism in favor of a heuristic-based realist view. Wimsatt’s world is a complex one, and this means that science needs to do away with all the absolute and simple answers, because they do not reflect the world we are living in. A complex world requires the mindset and tinkering of an engineer to uncover its reality. The appropriate response must be heuristics all the way down as we constantly seek out reliable inferences on often shifting ground. To this end, we aim for models and theories that are robust, just as engineers aim to build robust machines. And although errors occur and approaches are fallible, they allow us to continually adapt the heuristics applied and sharpen our perceptions so as to develop more refined tools for investigating and understanding the world.
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Notes
Editor’s note: This in-depth examination of a book that has attracted wide interest among Biological Theory’s readers was under preparation at the time of death of one of its authors, Werner Callebaut, the journal’s former editor-in-chief. Although it has now been several years since the book appeared, we have chosen to run this essay review as the opening article for our Special Issue on Recent Books.
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Acknowledgments
The authors want to thank Gerd B. Müller for co-organizing the interdisciplinary seminar on “Selected Problems in the Philosophy of Biology” in March to June 2011 and hosting the discussion roundtables at the Department of Theoretical Biology of the University of Vienna. We also want to express our gratitude to Ehab Abouheif (McGill University, Montreal) who inspired the discussants by providing extremely valuable insights into the scientific realms of evolutionary developmental biology.
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Werner Callebaut (1952–2014).
Christoph Frischer, Julia Lang, and Martin Schlumpp—University of Vienna, participants in the seminar “Selected Problems in the Philosophy of Biology,” Vienna, Austria.
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Sarto-Jackson, I., MacLeod, M., Handschuh, S. et al. A Piecewise Aggregation of (Some) Philosophers’ and Biologists’ Perspectives. Biol Theory 11, 1–10 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-016-0235-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-016-0235-5