Philosophy of Experimental Biology (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)
Cambridge University Press, 8/30/2004
EAN 9780521829458, ISBN10: 0521829453
Hardcover, 376 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Philosophy of Experimental Biology explores some central philosophical issues concerning scientific research in experimental biology, including genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, and microbiology. It seeks to make sense of the explanatory strategies, concepts, ways of reasoning, approaches to discovery and problem solving, tools, models and experimental systems deployed by scientific life science researchers and also integrates developments in historical scholarship, in particular the New Experimentalism. It concludes that historical explanations of scientific change that are based on local laboratory practice need to be supplemented with an account of the epistemic norms and standards that are operative in science. This book should be of interest to philosophers and historians of science as well as to scientists.
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Reductionism and the nature of explanations
3. Discovery
solving biological problems
4. Scientific inference
testing hypotheses
5. Experimental systems
a life of their own?
6. Model organisms
of flies and elephants
7. Reference and conceptual change
out of Mendel's garden?
8. Developmental biology and the genetic program
explaining ontogeny
9. Scientific realism
in search of the truth
Notes
Bibliography
Index.