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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2009

Lindley Darden
Lindley Darden
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
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Reasoning in Biological Discoveries
Essays on Mechanisms, Interfield Relations, and Anomaly Resolution
 , pp. 1 - 10
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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  • Introduction
  • Lindley Darden, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book: Reasoning in Biological Discoveries
  • Online publication: 31 August 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498442.002
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Lindley Darden, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book: Reasoning in Biological Discoveries
  • Online publication: 31 August 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498442.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Lindley Darden, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book: Reasoning in Biological Discoveries
  • Online publication: 31 August 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498442.002
Available formats
×