Can Philosophy Help Biology, or Philosophers Understand Biologists?

Abstract

Philosophy of science used to be a terrain colonized largely either by ex-physicists or trained philosophers attracted to the seeming certainties of physicist law-givers. Physics (and to a lesser extent, chemistry) has all the features a philosopher could desire. Its generalisations are universal, its regularities, dignified as laws, can be expressed with mathematical certainty, and its structures of experimental verification are models of clarity and precision. Even the theoretical debates within physics have become the stuff of philosophical analysis. The only other domain for philosophers appeared to be that provided by psychology, with its historical roots and current connections to the theory of mind and even consciousness. But as psychology merged into neuroscience in the 1960s, the space available for traditional philosophy seemed steadily to reduce. Recently, this has been vigorously re-occupied by a new group of 'neurophilosophers' (typified perhaps by Patricia Churchland), who are immensely attracted to the prospects of reducing both mind and brain to computational algorithms. How very different is the state of the biological sciences! Intensely empirical, our experimental findings are contingent and apparently incapable of generalisation, with virtually nothing recognisable as a 'law' in the sense that physicists know. Furthermore, biology was and is divided into numerous subsections, from animal behaviour and ecology to molecular biology, with seemingly few points of contact between these distinct disciplines. A delight to some who relish the infinite variety of 'natural history' and the pleasures of pluralism, these messy discourses, with their richness of data and inadequate standards of proof, have been a philosopher's nightmare.