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Why the Anti-reductionist Consensus Won’t Survive the Case of Classical Mendelian Genetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

C. Kenneth Waters
C. Kenneth Waters*
Affiliation:
Rice University
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Extract

Philosophers now treat the relationship between Classical Mendelian Genetics and molecular biology as a paradigm of nonreduction and this example is playing an increasingly prominent role in debates about the reducibility of theories ranging from macrosocial science to folk psychology. Patricia Churchland (1986), for example, draws an analogy between the alleged elimination of the “causal mainstay” of classical genetics and her view that today’s psychological theory will be eliminated by neuroscience. Patricia Kitcher takes an autonomous rather than eliminativist view of the reported nonreduction in genetics and reasons that psychology will retain a similar autonomy from lower level sciences (1980 and 1982). Although Churchland and Kitcher offer different interpretations of the apparent failure of molecular biology to reduce classical genetics, they agree that this failure will help illuminate theoretical relations between psychology and lower level sciences. The appearance of the Mendelian example along side the usual ones from physics and chemistry marks a turning point in philosophy of science.

Type
Part III. Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 125 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

I thank Bob Knox for stimulating discussions which influenced my thinking on this subject. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Pittsburgh and Indiana University where audiences provided helpful feedback. The National Science Foundation funded this research (Grant No. DIR 89-12221) and the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh provided additional support and hospitality while I worked on this paper.

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