Kuhn's Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Being Undermined by Inadequate Biological Concepts

Renzi, Barbara Gabriella

doi:10.1086/647928

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Second, these developments also offer an opportunity to build on previous attempts at using evolutionary and ecological theory to understand science (Bradie, 1986;Renzi, 2009), but with the benefit of the richer understanding of organism-environment interactions granted by modern ecology and evolution (as outlined in e.g. Kendal et al (2011).…”

Section: Science As Socio-ecological Activitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the socio-ecology of science: the case of coral reefs

Jones

2024

Euro Jnl Phil Sci

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In this paper I use data from interviews conducted with coral scientists to examine the socio-ecological dimensions of science, i.e. how science shapes and is shaped by the living world around it. I use two sets of ideas in particular: niche construction and socio-ecological value frameworks. Using these I offer socio-ecological criteria by which coral scientists evaluate the activities of coral science, more specifically which living systems are intended to benefit from coral science as an activity, and the motivations behind this. The overall picture I present is one of coral science as activity primarily aimed at sustaining a diverse set of living systems, including humans, other organisms, species, and ecosystems, and the social practices associated with these. The value relations between scientists and aspects of these processes dictate how they respond to shifts in the socio-ecological context coral science is embedded in, explaining why the activities associated with coral science are changing as reef ecosystems are threatened. The implication is that natural sciences more generally are entangled with a greater number of social and ecological process than is typically considered, and that shifts in the activities undertaken by scientists may be driven by ecological as well as social and epistemic processes.

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Section: Science As Socio-ecological Activitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the socio-ecology of science: the case of coral reefs

Jones

2024

Euro Jnl Phil Sci

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“…Unfortunately, he never wrote a longer version of his theory. Instead, in his later work, he focused on a few components of his 1962 sketch, mainly the notion of paradigms, the notion of incommensurability, and the passage about evolutionary epistemology (Renzi 2009): Structure truly "continued to dominate Kuhn's thinking until the end of his life (…)" (Marcum 2015, p. 53). As Hoyningen-Huene (2015, p. 185) puts it: "A really comprehensive account of these development (sic) remains to be written (…)."…”

Section: An Unorthodox Use Of Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?

Tanghe

Pauwels

Tiège

et al. 2021

Perspectives on Science

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Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before.

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“…Another consequence of the developmental view is the replacement of revolution for specialization as the engine of scientific progress. Renzi (2009) and Renzi and Napolitano (2018) consider the approximation between Kuhn's scientific and biological development as not fully adequate. Kuhn's accounts of evolutionary analogies would be "either oversimplified and sketchy or based on inadequate evolutionary premises and concepts" (RENZI, 2009, p. 159).…”

Section: How Serious Is Kuhn's Evolutionary Epistemology?mentioning

confidence: 99%

From Empirical Evidence to First Principles

Pirozelli

2020

Veritas

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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions represented a milestone in the attempt to understand scientific development based on empirical observations. However, in the next decades after the publication of his book, history, psychology, and sociology became increasingly marginal in Kuhn’s discussions. In his last articles, Kuhn even suggested that philosophers should pay less attention to empirical data and focus more on “first principles.” The purpose of this article is, first, to describe this radical transformation in Kuhn’s methodological approach, from his initial naturalism to his later and more strict philosophical stance. Next, I present some of the alleged justifications for explaining this transition, such as his interest in problems more firmly attached to the philosophical tradition and a desire for greater acceptance within this community. Although these factors certainly played a role in explaining Kuhn’s change, I also believe that an important theoretical component exerts a fundamental function in this transition: the idea that scientific development is a kind of evolutionary process, which is better understood through the use of abstract theoretical models, instead of sparse observations of scientific activity.

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Kuhn's Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Being Undermined by Inadequate Biological Concepts

Cited by 10 publications

References 5 publications

Exploring the socio-ecology of science: the case of coral reefs

Exploring the socio-ecology of science: the case of coral reefs

Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?

From Empirical Evidence to First Principles

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