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Reduction and Instrumentalism in Genetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Philip Gasper
Philip Gasper*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

In his important paper “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences” (1984), Philip Kitcher defends biological antireductionism, arguing that the division of biology into subfields such as classical and molecular genetics is “not simply … a temporary feature of our science stemming from our cognitive imperfections but [is] the reflection of levels of organization in nature” (p. 371). In a recent discussion of Kitcher's views, Alexander Rosenberg has argued, first, that Kitcher has shown that the reduction of classical to molecular genetics is impossible only because of our intellectual limitations and, second, that this kind of antireductionism supports an instrumentalist approach to biological theory. I argue that both of Rosenberg's claims should be rejected despite the fact that Kitcher misdiagnoses the central reason for the failure of reduction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , December 1992 , pp. 655 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I began work on this paper while participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar held at Brown University in the summer of 1990. I would like to thank the NEH for its support and the seminar's director, Jaegwon Kim, for stimulating discussion. Earlier versions were read at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco (March 1991) and at the University of Vermont. My thanks to Paul Tang, who commented in San Francisco, and to the audiences on both occasions. Thanks also to Richard Boyd, David Brink, Richard Moran, J. D. Trout and an anonymous reviewer for Philosophy of Science for helpful comments.

‡

Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.

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