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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
The question ‘Are there inherent differences among the phenomena studied by different sciences which require inherently different methodologies?’ has received considerable attention during the last century. Much of the debate has been fueled by logical positivism and logical empiricism, both of which embrace a commitment to the reduction of theories and the ultimate unity of science. This commitment presupposes that there are no inherent fundamental differences since any inherent differences would undermine the connected goals of reduction and unification. Hence, logical positivists and logical empiricists have attempted to show that the supposed differences are illusory. For example, Hempel and Nagel both argued vigorously that there are no inherent differences. Their strategy was to analyze a purported difference and argue either that the feature(s) responsible for the difference was not really present in the non-physical science or that it was after all present in the physical sciences as well.
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13 See Aspects of Scientific Explanation, 232-3.
14 As I indicated earlier, I have argued for a different view of laws and theories from that of the logical empiricist. This view, which is commonly called the semantic conception of theories, casts explanation as a complex relationship between a theory and phenomena that depends on isomorphism, not deduction, and is far richer than the deductive-nomological pattern of explanation. For this reason I find the general thrust of Hull’s article in the same collection as Richards’s (D.L. Hull, “The Particular-Circumstance Model of Scientific Explanation,’ in M.H. Nitecki and D.V. Nitecki, eds., History and Evolution, 69-80) interesting and attractive.
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17 Richards is unlikely to find the above arguments (or for that matter what follows) compelling, since he begins his analysis from a perspective hostile to philosophy of science and the use of mathematics. He claims at the outset of his paper:
Philosophers of Science and their beau ideal, the physicist, have never been very good at history, for that discipline requires an expansion of intellectual power and its penetration into fields afar to touch hidden connections, not the contraction of intellect into a narrow shaft of insight that bores down along prescribed mathematical lines. From the confined perspective of most philosophers and physicists, though, history has seemed to be the pursuit of pedestrian minds, grubbers of disparate detail who rarely raise their heads to gaze upon empyrean heights where facts reach to general laws (19-20).
It is hard to know how to respond to this name calling. Suffice it to say that I do not hold the pedestrian view of history he assigns to most philosophers and physicists and I am saddened that Richards holds such a jaded and low opinion of philosophy of science. Richards’s excellent book, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987) adequately attests to the value and richness of historical enquiry.
18 An important thesis of Richards’s paper is that explanation in the first edition of The Origin of Species (C. Darwin, The Origin of Species [London: Murray 1859]) is an extended narrative composed of smaller narratives. However, even if his analysis of the way in which Darwin chose to convey his ideas is correct — and there are strong arguments that this is not so (see Ruse, M. ‘Darwin’s Debt to Philosophy,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 6 [1975] 159-81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Lloyd, E.A. “The Nature of Darwin’s Support for the Theory of Natural Selection,’ Philosophy of Science 50 [1983) 112-29CrossRefGoogle Scholar) — this does not entail that the links in the narrative are not grounded by commonly held generalizations or theory of the time. More argument than indicating the narrative form is required to make the case that neither generalizations nor theories are involved when narratives play an explanatory role.
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