Half-baked Philosophy (Part 4)
[I've been sick all day, so this is my almost unreadable attempt to make the day not a total write-off.]
So I have one essay almost completely constructed. The impetus of the essay is born of a not-so-humble project: to say what Eliot Sober should have said, or what he should have meant, whichever is more arrogant.
You see, in his 1997 symposium paper, "Two Outbreaks of Lawlessness in Recent Philosophy of Biology", he tries to make the case that although he mostly agrees with the view that there are no empirical laws in biology (what I will call the Beatty/Rosenberg line), he thinks that biological laws take a curiously nonempirical form: when examined, they turn out to be simple mathematical truths. And so, biology is filled with all sorts of laws.
There is something to this approach, but sober has been rightly criticized for not saying about how we come to recognize that such laws apply to some part of biology. The thought here is that, prima facie at least, it is the empirical generalizations that allow us to discern the application of a law to a domain that are doing explanatory work. And we want laws to do explanatory work, right?
This is, as far as I can tell, where the debate has been ever since. The "laws of biology" debate is one of those thickets of views where there seem to be complex, multi-party dynamics of misunderstanding preventing progress. And I intend to add to this a modified conception of law.
My essay, as I said earlier, will say what Sober should have said. There is something right about laws in biology being nonempirical, but I think it has to do with Sober holding a different conception of law. He wants us to adopt a looser requirement for what counts as a law. Now, my addition to all this will be to mix in some metaphysics that were introduced about 20 years ago to the debate about natural laws. There is, I foresee, a dialectic which will have to take place, and the upshot of it will have to be that this different, more metaphysically committed view will have to acknowledge, yet importantly sidestep the main objection to laws in biology, namely, the simple observation that evolution is contingent, or put another way, that contingency plays a richer role in biology as a historical science than it does in physics (though, of course, it's there as well: compare the debates around fine-tuning and the anthropic principle).
This is the state of my thoughts right now. Somewhat confused, but I have an almost-outline in my notebook. The main question now is: how does the DTA view of laws (also known as the "necessitarian" view of laws) sidestep the evolutioanry contingency thesis?
Whew.
Consider: "Hope is a waking dream."
So I have one essay almost completely constructed. The impetus of the essay is born of a not-so-humble project: to say what Eliot Sober should have said, or what he should have meant, whichever is more arrogant.
You see, in his 1997 symposium paper, "Two Outbreaks of Lawlessness in Recent Philosophy of Biology", he tries to make the case that although he mostly agrees with the view that there are no empirical laws in biology (what I will call the Beatty/Rosenberg line), he thinks that biological laws take a curiously nonempirical form: when examined, they turn out to be simple mathematical truths. And so, biology is filled with all sorts of laws.
There is something to this approach, but sober has been rightly criticized for not saying about how we come to recognize that such laws apply to some part of biology. The thought here is that, prima facie at least, it is the empirical generalizations that allow us to discern the application of a law to a domain that are doing explanatory work. And we want laws to do explanatory work, right?
This is, as far as I can tell, where the debate has been ever since. The "laws of biology" debate is one of those thickets of views where there seem to be complex, multi-party dynamics of misunderstanding preventing progress. And I intend to add to this a modified conception of law.
My essay, as I said earlier, will say what Sober should have said. There is something right about laws in biology being nonempirical, but I think it has to do with Sober holding a different conception of law. He wants us to adopt a looser requirement for what counts as a law. Now, my addition to all this will be to mix in some metaphysics that were introduced about 20 years ago to the debate about natural laws. There is, I foresee, a dialectic which will have to take place, and the upshot of it will have to be that this different, more metaphysically committed view will have to acknowledge, yet importantly sidestep the main objection to laws in biology, namely, the simple observation that evolution is contingent, or put another way, that contingency plays a richer role in biology as a historical science than it does in physics (though, of course, it's there as well: compare the debates around fine-tuning and the anthropic principle).
This is the state of my thoughts right now. Somewhat confused, but I have an almost-outline in my notebook. The main question now is: how does the DTA view of laws (also known as the "necessitarian" view of laws) sidestep the evolutioanry contingency thesis?
Whew.
Consider: "Hope is a waking dream."
posted by A. D. at 10:31 PM
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