5 - The account in perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
Summary
THE STORY SO FAR
In Chapter 1, I posed four interconnected questions which, I argued, a realist would have to answer in order to support his account of the growth of scientific knowledge. Having answered questions (3) and (4), and discussed how to interpret the language of previous theorists, we are now in a position to sum up our answer to the second, to the question:
(2) How can we discover which objects belong to the extension of a natural kind predicate as that predicate is used within a linguistic community?
The key to our answer is that we have to determine what beliefs members of the linguistic community who used the predicate had about things to which they thought it could be correctly applied. We need to look at what Johannsen (the biologist who coined the term “gene”) and those following him believed about what they called genes, at what our ancestors believed about whales, at what beliefs Bohr held about the things he called electrons in 1911, and so on. Of course, it will not always be the case that our predecessors used the same term that we do for a given natural kind (think here of Stoney calling the electric charge on a hydrogen ion in electrolysis an ‘electron’), although when we begin to interpret their theory or language we might at first assume that they do.
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- Information
- Realism and the Progress of Science , pp. 104 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981