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The Effect of The Concept of Evolution on Scientific Methodology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

David L. Miller
David L. Miller*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin, Tex.
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Extract

Today there is almost universal agreement among scientists and philosophers that no factual statement or hypothesis about the world of fact has meaning apart from experienceable phenomena. In general we say we must find evidence for every hypothesis or theory before we can consider it as even probably true. But when we state the relationship between hypotheses and evidence in this way, by implication we are still holding that hypotheses have priority over data or that the function of data is to support pre-conceived ideas. This is, by implication, and acknowledgment of the primacy of rationalism over empiricism or of reason over sense data, or of explanation over that which is to be explained.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 1948 , pp. 52 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1948

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References

1 See “The Meanings of Emergence and its Modes,” by Arthur O. Lovejoy, in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, 1926.

2 See The Philosophy of the Present, Chapter I, by G. H. Mead.

3 Ibid., p. 15.

4 “The ingression of an object into an event is the way the character of the event shapes itself in virtue of the being of the object. Namely the event is what it is, because the object is what it is; and when I am thinking of this modification of the event by the object, 1 call the relationship between the two ‘the ingression of the object into the event.‘” The Concept of Nature, p. 144, By A. N. Whitehead.

5 “Thus the theory of objects is the theory of the comparison of events. Events are only comparable because they body forth permanences. We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say, ‘There it is again.’ Objects are the elements in nature which can ‘be again.’” A. N. Whitehead, ibid., p. 144.

6 A. N. Whitehead, Ibid., p. 52.

7 See the author's article, “Metaphysics in Physics,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 13, No. 4, October, 1946.

8 The Philosophy of the Present, p. 64.

9 E.g., E. A. Milne. See Experiment and Theory in Physics, pp. 38–44, by Max Born Cambridge University Press, 1943.

10 See “Objective Reality of Perspectives,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, 1926.

11 See my article, “The Nature of a Scientific Statement,” Philosophy of Science, July, 1947.

12 For a discussion of the relationship between reason and experience see “The Meaning of Rationalism,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XLIV, No. 8.