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Managing Complexity and Dynamics: Is There A Difference Between Biology and Physics?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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The question ‘Are there inherent differences among the phenomena studied by different sciences which require inherently different methodologies?’ has received considerable attention during the last century. Much of the debate has been fueled by logical positivism and logical empiricism, both of which embrace a commitment to the reduction of theories and the ultimate unity of science. This commitment presupposes that there are no inherent fundamental differences since any inherent differences would undermine the connected goals of reduction and unification. Hence, logical positivists and logical empiricists have attempted to show that the supposed differences are illusory. For example, Hempel and Nagel both argued vigorously that there are no inherent differences. Their strategy was to analyze a purported difference and argue either that the feature(s) responsible for the difference was not really present in the non-physical science or that it was after all present in the physical sciences as well.
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References
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Philosophers of Science and their beau ideal, the physicist, have never been very good at history, for that discipline requires an expansion of intellectual power and its penetration into fields afar to touch hidden connections, not the contraction of intellect into a narrow shaft of insight that bores down along prescribed mathematical lines. From the confined perspective of most philosophers and physicists, though, history has seemed to be the pursuit of pedestrian minds, grubbers of disparate detail who rarely raise their heads to gaze upon empyrean heights where facts reach to general laws (19-20).
It is hard to know how to respond to this name calling. Suffice it to say that I do not hold the pedestrian view of history he assigns to most philosophers and physicists and I am saddened that Richards holds such a jaded and low opinion of philosophy of science. Richards’s excellent book, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987) adequately attests to the value and richness of historical enquiry.
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