Integrated HPS Community
Permanent link for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/25833
This collection consists of contributions presented at the "&HPS" conference series organized by the Committee for Integrated HPS, a network of scholars dedicated to the integration of the history of science and the philosophy of science. The Committee was established in 2006. Its members work at IU's Department of History and Philosophy of Science and in history and philosophy institutions around the world. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the NSF (grant # SES-1921821), which helped fund the gathering of data for this collection.
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Browsing Integrated HPS Community by Subject "biology"
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Item Building Blocks and the Principle of Plurality: Model-Building Heuristics in Long-Term Research Collectives(2018) Kärin Nickelsen; K.Nickelsen@lmu.deItem Coordination of biophysical and biochemical research, 1920s and 1930s(2018) Caterina Schürch; Caterina.Schuerch@lrz.uni-muenchen.deItem How Organisms Represent(2018) Rachel Ankeny; Sabina Leonelli; rachel.ankeny@adelaide.edu.auItem Linking theoretical content and context: a carrier-trait approach(2018) Gábor Zemplén; zemplen@filozofia.bme.huItem Negotiating a causal-historical theory of reference: the emergence of the ‘type method’ in 19th century biological taxonomy(2014) Joeri Witteveen; jw@ind.ku.dk; Jane MaienscheinItem Neither Logical Empiricism nor Vitalism, but Organicism: What the Philosophy of Biology Was(2014) Daniel Nicholson; Richard Gawne; dan.j.nicholson@gmail.com and richard.gawne@kli.ac.at; Katherina KinzelPhilosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse.Item Spot the difference: Causal contrasts in scientific diagram(2016) Raphael Scholl; aphael.scholl@gmail.com,An important function of scientific diagrams is to identify causal relationships. This commonly relies on contrasts that highlight the effects of specific difference-makers. However, causal contrast diagrams are not an obvious and easy to recognize category because they appear in many guises. In this paper, four case studies are presented to examine how causal contrast diagrams appear in a wide range of scientific reports, from experimental to observational and even purely theoretical studies. It is shown that causal contrasts can be expressed in starkly different formats, including photographs of complexly visualized macromolecules as well as line graphs, bar graphs, or plots of state spaces. Despite surface differences, however, there is a measure of conceptual unity among such diagrams. In empirical studies they often serve not only to infer and communicate specific causal claims, but also as evidence for them. The key data of some studies is given nowhere except in the diagrams. Many diagrams show multiple causal contrasts in order to demonstrate both that an effect exists and that the effect is specific – that is, to narrowly circumscribe the phenomenon to be explained. In a large range of scientific reports, causal contrast diagrams reflect the core epistemic claims of the researchers.Item Styles of Reasoning in Biology: The Case of Models in Membrane and Cell Biology(2014) Axel Gelfert; Jacob Mok; axel@gelfert.net; Jane MaienscheinThis paper investigates one of the great achievements of twentiethcentury cell biology: determining the structure of the cell membrane. This case differs in important ways from the better-known case of the identification of the DNA double helix as the carrier of genetic information, especially regarding the evaluation of potential evidence in light of prior theoretical commitments. Whereas it has been argued that adherence to a structural hypothesis enabled Watson and Crick to ignore a surplus of (potentially confusing) empirical findings, similar adherence to an elegant and universal structural hypothesis, we argue, unduly shielded the so-called ‘unit-membrane’ model from legitimate challenges on the basis of known phenomena.