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Normality as a Biological Concept

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Robert Wachbroit
Robert Wachbroit*
Affiliation:
Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, Van Munching Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
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Abstract

The biological sciences employ a concept of normality that must be distinguished from statistical or value concepts. The concept of normality is presupposed in the standard explications of biological functions, and it is crucial to the strategy of explanation by approximations in, for example, physiology. Nevertheless, this concept of normality does not seem to be captured in the language of physics. Thus attempts at explaining the methodological relationship between the biological sciences and the physical sciences by concentrating only on the concept of biological function cannot go very far. An analysis of the concept of normality is also necessary.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 579 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1994

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Footnotes

†

Work on this article was supported in part by a grant R01 HG00419 from the National Institutes of Health Center for Human Genome Research. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments I received on an earlier draft from Elliott Sober, David Wasserman, and especially Ken Schaffner, as well as from an anonymous referee.

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