This book discusses reasoning strategies for discovery that are exemplified in numerous biological cases. Scientific discovery should be viewed as an extended, piecemeal process with hypotheses undergoing iterative refinement. Construction, evaluation, and revision are tightly connected in ways that philosophers of science have often not recognized, given their neglect of reasoning in hypothesis construction and revision. Examination of historical cases from twentieth-century biology reveals reasoning strategies that could have produced the changes that did occur. Such critically examined reasoning strategies constitute compiled hindsight gleaned from these past episodes. Examples come from the fields of molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. Making reasoning strategies explicit shows that they are not merely descriptions of unique historical changes or unwarranted overly general prescriptions. They are advisory. They may be of use as metascientific hypotheses in philosophical and historical analyses of scientific reasoning, of use in future empirical and computational biological research, and of use in science education. Hence, one goal of this book is to make explicit reasoning strategies for construction, evaluation, and revision of scientific hypotheses.

Biologists often seek to discover mechanisms. Knowing what is to be discovered aids the extended process of discovery. The examination of the nature and means of representing biological theories aids analysis of reasoning in their discovery. What play the roles of theories in molecular biology, for example, are diagrammatically represented sets of mechanism schemas for such widely found mechanisms as DNA replication, protein synthesis, and many varieties of gene regulation.

INTRODUCTION

The key ideas in the chapters in Part I on mechanisms and those in Part II on reasoning strategies now need to be integrated and extended. The chapters in Part I provide a characterization of mechanisms, based on an analysis of paradigm cases from molecular and neurobiology. Those chapters also begin a search for reasoning strategies for discovering mechanisms and for analyzing the role of mechanisms in understanding the relations among fields in biology. The chapters in Part II discuss reasoning strategies in scientific change, including the use of analogies, interfield theories, and abstract types of theories, as well as strategies for anomaly resolution.

Biologists often seek to discover mechanisms, as we have seen in previous chapters. The task now is to summarize and extend previous work on reasoning strategies for discovering mechanisms. When the discovery task is construed in an unconstrained way to find some sort of hypothesis, little guidance is available. It is not surprising that some philosophers relegated discovery to psychology, to the study of presumed “a-ha” discovery moments (Popper 1965). They had little to say about how to discover hypotheses or to revise them in light of anomalies. However, when the task is specified as the discovery of a mechanism, much can be said about how to proceed. The product guides the process of discovery, as stressed in Chapters 2 and 3.

INTRODUCTION

Philosophers of biology have debated the nature of the relations between Mendelian genetics and molecular biology for some fifty years. They have proposed a variety of relations between the fields, including reduction, replacement, and explanatory extension. This chapter proposes a new analysis: the two fields discovered separate but serially connected mechanisms. These hereditary mechanisms have different working entities and the mechanisms operate at different times in an integrated temporal series of hereditary mechanisms. This analysis better characterizes the practice of biologists than previous accounts, as evidenced both by the historical development of the two fields and by presentations of the results of the two fields in contemporary textbooks.

Accounts of formal reduction played many roles in philosophical analyses of science in the second half of the twentieth century. Reduction was seen both as the relation among theories at different levels of organization at a given time (sometimes called “microreduction”) and as the relation between predecessor and successor theories. Furthermore, reduction was tied closely to explanation. The connection between what was to be explained (the explanandum) and what did the explaining (the explanans, usually general laws) was claimed to be (usually) deduction (Hempel 1965). Hence, the deduction of the reduced theory (or the observations that it explained) from the reducing theory in formal reduction permitted the claim that the reducing theory explained the reduced theory (or its observation statements). The status of the reduced theory after a reduction was different in different accounts of formal reduction.

As science turned its focus towards ‘man’, new disciplines emerged with the aim of utilizing scientific methods to understand and regulate human behaviour. Rather than understanding this scientific inquiry into human behaviour as a unique historical phenomenon with an identifiable moment of origin, we must recognize its continuity with a long tradition through which it found momentum yet against which it would struggle for authority. The search for knowledge about human existence and behaviour clearly did not begin with the emergence of science as a discrete discipline in the eighteenth century; instead, through a complex network of intellectual and social reconfigurations, it was incorporated into an emerging disciplinary structure and found legitimization through its relation to science. During this time of change in how knowledge was produced, valued and circulated, a range of new disciplines contended for authority over self-knowledge. To understand how psychoanalysis would eventually come to function within this network of disciplines and ultimately to undermine the concept of science itself, I want to consider briefly how several of them developed and how they come to contribute to Freud's psychoanalytic project.

As philosophy became focused on metaphysical questions explored primarily through philosophical speculation and reason, physiologists continued to use scientific methods to observe and measure bodily responses as a means of establishing the basic foundations for sensory physiology. Despite their attempts to understand all perceptual phenomena in terms of mechanistic bodily operations, however, physiologists were increasingly confronted with a factor that they seemed unable to explain.

Introduction: Visual Worldmaking

Leading, primarily, a visual existence, man's main orientations are focused on light and perception of light. The optical channels of a human being are superior to the rest of his sensory inputs, as long as quantity and complexity of data are under question. With regard to linguistic design, metaphors of light hold an eminent position in human discourse, connected especially to fields of knowledge, learning, moral quality and aesthetic perfection. As a consequence, they stand out in all ideological terrains of human self-constitution, concerning basic religious concepts, their narrative transformations as well as rationalistic sublimations of these models, during modernity's development towards the age of enlightenment.

This essay deals with the interrelationship between scientific–especially physical–theories and the ideological groundwork of a given culture. Centring on influences emerging from pre-formal concepts of reality, the problem will be raised if any explicit physical theory will succeed in keeping a constitutive distance from such pre-scientific forms of worldmaking. It will need to be asked if modern quantifying approaches to nature fall under the clandestine seizure of intersubjective and intracultural dynamics, importing a basic matrix of anthropomorphic worldmaking into those formal and quantified versions of reality we use to call sciences.

Complying with such a project gives good reasons to keep a secure distance from positions which take the social construction of all forms of reality and worldmaking for granted. It is not the structuring idea of this paper to underline the presumable irrelevance of scientific hopes for objective truths – a tendency one might call ‘epistemic relativism’.

The search for health is a constant in all societies, but the increasing wealth of Victorian society made it a realizable priority for an ever-widening clientele. And given the limitations of conventional medicine, with its reliance on techniques such as bleeding or drastic drug regimes, it was not surprising that a galaxy of alternative therapies offered themselves, which were then denounced as quackery by the profession. Some of the fringe movements were chimeras that flourished briefly and faded as quickly. Others showed more staying power, and among the weightier was hydropathy, a system centred on the use of a series of water treatments which originated in Austria in the 1820s at the Gräfenberg establishment of Vincent Priessnitz. Hydropathy was but one of several unorthodox medical therapies on offer in early Victorian Britain. Where it differed from the other fringe movements – mesmerism, galvanism, botanism and even homeopathy – is that it attracted substantial long-term commercial investment. Whereas homeopathy, the most successful of its competitors on the medical margin, remained almost entirely a clinic and surgery bound enthusiasm, hydropathy established its place on both the therapeutic and the physical landscape. The first hydropathic, or water-cure, establishments in Britain appeared in the early 1840s in and around London, subsequently spreading west and north. In England, it was, however, to become an increasingly provincial interest, surviving in its original curative form by the 1880s only at a few northern outposts such as Stockport.

The past two hundred years have seen naturalistic and often materialistic modes of scientific inquiry (as advocated by, for example, John Tyndall and Richard Dawkins) superseding the teleological and theistic methods used by earlier non-specialists. This hardening of the scientific viewpoint (though not absolute, particularly in physics) is interesting when one considers the concomitant increase in the acceptability to the general public of evolutionary explanations, the increase in the popularization of what was seen as ‘good science’, and the parallel reduction of extra-epistemic factors in evolutionary theorizing. In this essay I briefly examine two episodes within the development of a professional Victorian geology: the rejection of ‘scriptural geology’ by the emerging geological community and the controversy over the 1844 publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Both of these episodes nicely illustrate the boundary work that went into delineating the emerging community from those that used, and what would become, sidelined modes of discourse. As a part of this delineation – and over the course of the early part of the century – geology was characterized as a practical, specialized, active, ‘masculine’ endeavour that was amenable to Christianity. Such rhetoric allowed the community to distance themselves from both Biblical literalists and the amateurs who in many ways founded the field, thus moving the adjudication of scientific claims out of the public sphere into the hands of what would eventually become the scientific profession.

In 1859, Prince Albert addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) as its President and attempted to assess the place of science in the modern State. In his description of science, he says:

A little over a year later Albert was dead, but his vision of the material location for the operations of science was beginning to be accomplished.

In early May 1868, the correspondence pages of the Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) were the scene of a heated debate between two of the most well known figures of the day, Professor John Tyndall and Mr Daniel Dunglas Home. Each man was the recognized leader of his field, but their fields were apparently diametrically opposed. Tyndall was head of the Royal Institution and the natural heir to the late Michael Faraday as experimental philosopher and materialist scientist; Home was celebrated across Europe and America as a gifted spiritualist medium, whose physical phenomena were unsurpassed. Their topic was a séance proposed in 1861, at which Faraday was to have examined spiritualist phenomena produced by Home, but which had not ultimately taken place. The two men began a stiffly polite dialogue within the correspondence columns, but rapidly degenerated into personal attacks and self-vindicating reasoning. By the time they called a truce in late May, the debate had clearly demonstrated the strength of the barriers constructed between established scientific practice and areas of investigation still regarded as beyond the scientific pale.

In his pamphlet Observations on the Education of the People, Henry Brougham links scientific education with a stable working populace. For Brougham, science was a unity, and reflection upon it would reveal an ordered world, functioning correctly. ‘The more widely science is diffused’, he writes, ‘the better will the Author of all things be known’. Yet, this view of science, predicated as it was upon a unified Nature, was actively critiqued in the early nineteenth century. Cheap, mass-market periodicals such as the Mechanic's Magazine emerged from a combination of technological innovation, philosophical radicalism and entrepreneurial opportunism, to provide a textual space for an alternative scientific culture. These titles foregrounded dialogue, preventing the ‘thematic finalization’ necessary to disseminate unified Nature as a final signified. Their textual community, lying outside of ‘high’ scientific discourse and yet at times engaging with it, allowed members to negotiate and appropriate, in a dialogic exchange, the contested signs of the industrial age.

This chapter seeks to recover this rival scientific discourse and, by exploring its foundation in the textual community that supported it, identify its codes, constructions and participants. The chapter is organized into three sections: the first considers the foundation of the Mechanic's Magazine and the strategies employed by the editors to carve out a readership from within the reading audience of the new ‘mass’ journals such as the Mirror of Literature.