_Conjectures and Refutations_ is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

_Conjectures and Refutations_ is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

In a passage in A Theory of Justice, which has become increasingly influential in recent years, John Rawls (1971) noted an analogy between moral phi- losophy and grammar. Moral philosophy, or at least the first stage of moral philosophy, Rawls maintained, can be thought of as the attempt to describe our moral capacity – the capacity which underlies “the poten- tially infinite number and variety of [moral] judgments we are prepared..

In the context of scientists' reflections on genomics, we examine some fundamental issues in the emerging postgenomic discipline of systems biology. Systems biology is best understood as consisting of two streams. One, which we shall call ‘pragmatic systems biology’, emphasises large‐scale molecular interactions; the other, which we shall refer to as ‘systems‐theoretic biology’, emphasises system principles. Both are committed to mathematical modelling, and both lack a clear account of what biological systems are. We discuss the underlying issues in identifying systems (...) and how causality operates at different levels of organisation. We suggest that resolving such basic problems is a key task for successful systems biology, and that philosophers could contribute to its realisation. We conclude with an argument for more sociologically informed collaboration between scientists and philosophers. BioEssays 27:1270–1276, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is an increasingly high-profile area of research that can be understood as encompassing three broad approaches towards the synthesis of living systems: DNA-based device construction, genome-driven cell engineering and protocell creation. Each approach is characterized by different aims, methods and constructs, in addition to a range of positions on intellectual property and regulatory regimes. We identify subtle but important differences between the schools in relation to their treatments of genetic determinism, cellular context and complexity. These distinctions tie into (...) two broader issues that define synthetic biology: the relationships between biology and engineering, and between synthesis and analysis. These themes also illuminate synthetic biology's connections to genetic and other forms of biological engineering, as well as to systems biology. We suggest that all these knowledge-making distinctions in synthetic biology raise fundamental questions about the nature of biological investigation and its relationship to the construction of biological components and systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in the Early Writings of Giambattista VicoRobert C. MinerAs several contemporary writers have noted, Giambattista Vico defends the idea of practical knowledge, a type of knowledge that cannot be fully expressed by propositions and defies reductions to method. 1 The defense of practical knowledge, against Descartes and the rise of objectifying science, is most clearly articulated in a group of Vico’s early writings: the oration (...) De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), the metaphysical book De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), and two rejoinders (Prima and Seconda risposte) to critics of the De antiquissima. In these texts Vico criticizes Cartesian method in terms that remind us of Aristotle, or at least the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. “If you were to import the geometrical method into practical life, you would do no more than exhaust yourself in becoming a rational lunatic” (A 7.5). 2This comment and many others like it seem to suggest that Vico is an “Aristotelian,” but any simple classification is problematic. In the same text in which Vico defends the Aristotelian topos he also announces that “the true and the made are convertible” (verum et factum convertuntur). The emphasis on the [End Page 53] role of “making” in truth seems incompatible with the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, whose knowledge is associated with praxis and cannot be reduced to techne. It would be simpler if Vico distinguished between a realm in which the verum-factum principle applied and one in which prudentia was supreme. However, Vico not only situates mathematics and experimental science within the metaphysical framework governed by verum-factum, but also implies strong connections between making and ethics. The prominence Vico assigns to making in all areas of human endeavor gives him a distinctly modern appearance in the fashion of Bacon, Galileo, and Hobbes.This gives rise to both hermeneutical and philosophical problems. Is Vico simply hesitating between the old and new? Does he coherently balance an Aristotelian perspective with the “modern” emphasis on artifice? 3 Perhaps Vico is caught in the middle of the querelle des anciens et modernes, somewhat like John Dunn’s version of Locke, a “tragic figure” who cannot reconcile his epistemological discoveries with a noninstrumentalist view of practical reason. 4 The purpose of this essay is to provide a sympathetic interpretation of Vico’s early writings on prudentia and its links to both verum-factum and rhetoric.Vico contra Rule-based EthicsThe denial that ethics is well understood as a matter of following or justifying general rules has become a commonplace among contemporary Aris-totelians and Wittgensteinians. 5 Against the Enlightenment ambition to construct a universally valid moral science, recent virtue ethics has emphasized the irreducibly contingent aspects of human life, aspects which resist the clutches of “method.” Although Descartes wrote little about morals directly, his influence can be detected in the ethical writings of Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Sidgwick. These examples of modern moral philosophy presuppose the correctness of the Cartesian diagnosis of ancient and medieval writing on virtue. In the Discourse on Method Descartes compares previous moral teaching to “the most proud and magnificent palaces built on nothing but sand or mud.” 6 Descartes himself did not provide a rational justification of ethics, but he has had no shortage of successors who have tried to complete his foundational project. Jusnaturalism, Kantian deontology, and utilitarianism, as different as they are from one another, share the desire to ground ethics in principles as universal and certain as [End Page 54] those of mathematics. Each of these variants of post-Cartesian ethics claim to have discovered and justified such a principle or set of principles. Maxims deduced from the principle, if not the principle itself, will arguably enable moral agents to discover the right course of action in a particular situation.Vico did not live to witness the most articulate expressions of a Cartesian approach to ethics, but he did apprehend the shift in focus from prudence to method. In the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an oration delivered at the University of Naples in 1708 and published the following year, Vico criticizes approaches that locate... (shrink)

The question is discussed how noise gained a functional meaning in the context of biology. According to the common view, noise is considered a disturbance or perturbation. I analyze how this understanding changed and what kind of developments during the last 10 years contributed to the emergence of a new understanding of noise. Results gained during a field study in a synthetic biology laboratory show that the emergence of this new research discipline—its highly interdisciplinary character, its new technologies and novel (...) modeling strategies—provided essential impulses, which led to the observed change in the concept of noise. The laboratory study is combined with a historical analysis, which explores the general question as to how concepts travel between disciplines and, specifically, how noise was transferred from engineering and physics into biology. In the past, scientists, such as Lotka and Goodwin, tried to introduce a statistical mechanics into biology and discussed the problem of “unfitting” concepts. The change in the meaning of the concept can be interpreted as a way of making it fit to the novel context in which it is applied. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos; II—Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Page.

Imre Lakatos; II—Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Page.

In this paper I argue that the appropriate analogy for “understanding what makes simulation results reliable” in global climate modeling is not with scientific experimentation or measurement, but—at least in the case of the use of global climate models for policy development—with the applications of science in applied design problems. The prospects for using this analogy to argue for the quantitative reliability of GCMs are assessed and compared with other potential strategies.

In this paper I argue that the appropriate analogy for “understanding what makes simulation results reliable” in Global Climate Modeling is not with scientific experimentation or measurement, but—at least in the case of the use of global climate models for policy development—with the applications of science in engineering design problems. The prospects for using this analogy to argue for the quantitative reliability of GCMs are assessed and compared with other potential strategies.

The simple question, what is empirical success? turns out to have a surprisingly complicated answer. We need to distinguish between meritorious fit and ‘fudged fit', which is akin to the distinction between prediction and accommodation. The final proposal is that empirical success emerges in a theory dependent way from the agreement of independent measurements of theoretically postulated quantities. Implications for realism and Bayesianism are discussed. ‡This paper was written when I was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of (...) Science at the University of Pittsburgh; I thank everyone for their support. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The law of gravitation, an example of physical law The relation of mathematics to physics The great conservation principles Symmetry in physical law The distinction of past and future Probability and uncertainty: the quantum mechanical view of nature Seeking new laws.

Karl Popper defines an ad hoc hypothesis as one that is introduced to immunize a theory from some (or all) refutation but which cannot be tested independently. He has also attempted to explicate ad hocness in terms of certain other allegedly undesirable properties of hypotheses or of the explanations they would provide, but his account is confused and mistaken. The first such property is circularity, which is undesirable; the second such property is reduction in empirical content, which need not be. (...) In the former case, I argue that non-circularity is in any event preferable to non-ad hocness as a necessary condition for a satisfactory explanation or an explanans, as the case may be, and I try to sort out various persistent errors surrounding this comparison. In the latter case, I suggest that Popper is barking up the wrong tree, that important scientific progress sometimes does consist in just such reductions in empirical content as he proscribes. This provides a further reason for not taking ad hoc hypotheses as Popper conceives them to pose the danger for science he believes they do. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is an increasingly high‐profile area of research that can be understood as encompassing three broad approaches towards the synthesis of living systems: DNA‐based device construction, genome‐driven cell engineering and protocell creation. Each approach is characterized by different aims, methods and constructs, in addition to a range of positions on intellectual property and regulatory regimes. We identify subtle but important differences between the schools in relation to their treatments of genetic determinism, cellular context and complexity. These distinctions tie into (...) two broader issues that define synthetic biology: the relationships between biology and engineering, and between synthesis and analysis. These themes also illuminate synthetic biology's connections to genetic and other forms of biological engineering, as well as to systems biology. We suggest that all these knowledge‐making distinctions in synthetic biology raise fundamental questions about the nature of biological investigation and its relationship to the construction of biological components and systems. BioEssays 30:57–65, 2008. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Since the late 1980s, the neglect of experiment by philosophers and historians of science has been replaced by a keen interest in the subject. In this volume, a number of prominent philosophers of experiment directly address basic theoretical questions, develop existing philosophical accounts, and offer novel perspectives on the subject, rather than rely exclusively on historical cases of experimental practice. Each essay examines one or more of six interconnected themes that run throughout the collection: the philosophical implications of actively and (...) intentionally interfering with the material world while conducting experiments; issues of interpretation regarding causality; the link between science and technology; the role of theory in experimentation involving material and causal intervention; the impact of modeling and computer simulation on experimentation; and the philosophical implications of the design, operation, and use of scientific instruments. (shrink)

The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research.

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.

In 1979, Lewontin and I borrowed the archi- tectural term “spandrel” (using the pendentives of San Marco in Venice as an example) to designate the class of forms and spaces that arise as necessary byproducts of another decision in design, and not as adaptations for direct utility in them- selves. This proposal has generated a large literature featur- ing two critiques: (i) the terminological claim that the span- drels of San Marco are not true spandrels at all and (ii) the (...) conceptual claim that they are adaptations and not byprod- ucts. The features of the San Marco pendentives that we explicitly defined as spandrel-properties—their necessary number (four) and shape (roughly triangular)—are inevitable architectural byproducts, whatever the structural attributes of the pendentives themselves. The term spandrel may be extended from its particular architectural use for two- dimensional byproducts to the generality of “spaces left over,” a definition that properly includes the San Marco pendentives. Evolutionary biology needs such an explicit term for features arising as byproducts, rather than adaptations, whatever their subsequent exaptive utility. The concept of biological span- drels—including the examples here given of masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality— anchors the critique of overreliance upon adaptive scenarios in evolutionary explanation. Causes of historical origin must always be separated from current utilities; their conf lation has seriously hampered the evolutionary analysis of form in the history of life. (shrink)

Understanding how scientific activities use naming stories to achieve disciplinary status is important not only for insight into the past, but for evaluating current claims that new disciplines are emerging. In order to gain a historical understanding of how new disciplines develop in relation to these baptismal narratives, we compare two recently formed disciplines, systems biology and genomics, with two earlier related life sciences, genetics and molecular biology. These four disciplines span the twentieth century, a period in which the processes (...) of disciplinary demarcation fundamentally changed from those characteristic of the nineteenth century. We outline how the establishment of each discipline relies upon an interplay of factors that include paradigmatic achievements, technological innovation, and social formations. Our focus, however, is the baptism stories that give the new discipline a founding narrative and articulate core problems, general approaches and constitutive methods. The highly plastic process of achieving disciplinary identity is further marked by the openness of disciplinary definition, tension between technological possibilities and the ways in which scientific issues are conceived and approached, synthesis of reductive and integrative strategies, and complex social interactions. The importance – albeit highly variable – of naming stories in these four cases indicates the scope for future studies that focus on failed disciplines or competing names. Further attention to disciplinary histories could, we suggest, give us richer insight into scientific development. (shrink)