12 - The Philosophy of Biology and the Philosophy of Science

Summary

In concluding our retrospective of the relations between philosophy and biology past and present, we may ask what the emergence of a philosophy of biology can contribute to the philosophy of science in general. What can the study of biology teach us if we take it either as our model field or as a model for our field?

There have so far been two major movements in recent philosophy of science. First, there was the so-called received view, initially logical positivism, rechristened logical empiricism. Taking fundamental physics, or a caricature of it, as its model, it separated the process of discovery (which it ignored) from the context of justification. Within the latter context, it aimed at a logical reconstruction of science, a science that rigorously followed a single hypothetico-deductive method, and that was to issue in the utopian structure of a unified science. In reaction, sociologists, and even some philosophers of science, have practiced a sociological deconstruction of science, which has left that family of disciplines with no claim whatsoever to epistemic justification. For the first school, science, with its sacrosanct method, stands serenely outside society, or else deigns to direct it by applying its superior procedure. For the second, science is reduced to politics: In effect, there is only society, no science.

What if we come to the philosophy of science through reflections on biology rather than physics, or some abstract dream of physics, as the received view used to do, or in preference to taking as our model for philosophy a rather naive sociology?