Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics brings together two projects. The first concerns scientific metaphysics, which is distinct from the metaphysics of science. The latter project essentially considers our best scientific theories and tries to determine the ontology of those theories. For example, following the methods of W. V. O. Quine ([1948]), we might determine the ontological commitments of evolutionary theory by examining what it ineliminably quantifies over in its domain. From there, we might find that the theory is committed to genes, organisms, species, and the like. However, this approach does not tell us whether the world is that way, since it only tells the commitments of the theory. Additionally, it does not tell us what sort of attitude to take to the theory (Yablo [1998]). For example, evolutionary theory may say that certain traits have proper functions, but we can reasonably ask if in fact they do. Here we might simply take on a ‘design stance’ by treating the traits of organisms as if they have proper functions. Scientific metaphysics would consider what evolutionary theory says, but it would not end there. We might leverage the best confirmed parts to determine what in fact there is. In this sense, scientific metaphysics operates like a meta-science, determining what the world is like. The metaphysics of science is also importantly different from traditional metaphysics. The methods therein often use conceptual analysis, intuition, or inference to the best explanation to determine what there is. This approach is often done a priori, with an indifference to the sciences. What makes this volume distinctive is its combination of scientific metaphysics with the ‘practice turn’ in the philosophy of science. But what is the practice turn?

In the 1970s and 1980s especially, the philosophy of science saw a partial change of focus. Instead of only producing general philosophies of science or analyses of issues therein, philosophers began to examine issues particular to the special sciences. This is not to deny that such specialized work had already existed. For example, Hans Reichenbach ([1944], [1956], [1957]) provided detailed analyses of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics. Likewise, Carl Hempel ([1965]) provided an account of teleological explanation. However, these analyses were exceptions and not the rule. Most of the philosophical work being done at this point was aimed at developing accounts of scientific progress, explanation, confirmation, and reduction that would apply to all the sciences, or at least the mature ones. But by the 1980s, many more philosophers were working on issues in the philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of psychology, and so on. Some of those issues were localized to particular sciences, like the units of selection debate in biology; and some were general issues in a local context, for example, scientific realism concerning the nature of space-time.

Since then, the philosophies of the special sciences have become even more particularized. Philosophers of biology have realized, for instance, that an analysis of evolutionary theory does not constitute an analysis of developmental biology, molecular biology, or ecology. There are even more specific issues that arise in those branches of the special sciences that need philosophical and methodological consideration. Moreover, how these different branches of the special sciences bear on one another is itself something to which philosophers can contribute. Thus, the practical turn in the philosophy of science also includes focusing on local details in the sciences. But it includes not just the local details of specific sciences, but also practices such as fieldwork, laboratory experimentation, and the like.

Another important component of the practice turn concerns the infusion of work from the history and sociology of science (Soler et al. [2014]). These disciplines introduced important considerations in the development of science that went beyond questions about theories. As I mentioned, traditional philosophers of science focused on questions about the nature of scientific theories, confirmation, explanation, and reduction. But history and sociology widened the view of what contributes to scientific development, change, and progress. With the incorporation of these insights, Thomas Kuhn ([1962]) introduced the concept of a paradigm, Imre Lakatos ([1970]) that of a research programme, Larry Laudan ([1977]) that of a research tradition, and so on. These ideas drew attention to things other than theory. In the opening chapter, Bausman, Baxter, and Lean provide a summary of what a practice-based philosopher is:

In short, practice-­focused philosophers typically view science as a richly interconnected system of activities, skills, strategies, and background knowledge by means of which scientists investigate their domains for a variety of purposes. In particular, they avoid viewing science purely in terms of its theories. (p. x)

It is not just that the objects studied by philosophers of science include more than theories. There is an emphasis on the sciences as tools. For example, instead of evaluating science in terms of the ‘truth-aptness’ of their products, we should determine whether a given practice is ‘use-apt’. From a practice point of view, scientific realism is transformed from a question about the approximate truth of theories to one about whether a scientific practice provides successful knowledge-how.

Accepting this conjoining of scientific metaphysics with the practice turn, the authors of this volume consider several topics. First, instead of providing a ‘metaphysics of causation’, we are given an interventionist approach to causation. Causation is understood in terms of idealized interventions or manipulations of independent variables (Woodward [2005]). The notion of manipulation is causal one, of course, but there is no requirement to avoid circularity in favour of a reduction. An account of causation pays its dues by how useful it is for understanding the practices of a given science or sciences. Second, classification and natural kinds are understood in the context of pluralism (Kellert et. al. [2006]). There are many ways to classify a domain of objects and these can be ‘incommensurable’ with one another. A classification is considered as reasonable insofar far as it furthers the aims of science, but also captures the dependencies of the objects of interest. Third, scientific realism is formulated in ways that are not dependent on theories being approximately true in terms of correspondence truth. We might concern ourselves with strategies and their likelihood of success, for example. Truth might be understood as stability of belief under a variety of perspectives or as indefeasible.

This collection involves philosophers of biology all working on metaphysical topics in a practice-friendly way. They do not explicitly adopt this position so much as illustrate a focus on biological practice in unpacking a scientific metaphysics. Let me now summarize the chapters.

William Wimsatt, in his ‘Evolution and the Metabolism of Error’, explores and elaborates on a key tool in determining the metaphysics of science: robustness analysis. Something is robust insofar as it can be accessed by many independent methods. As the different methods increase in number, the more confident we can be of the reality of the entity in question. Additionally, when there are failures of independence, we can use this as a heuristic to explore error. Wimsatt’s notion of robustness serves as a potential foundation for naturalistic, scientific metaphysics.

William Bausman, in his ‘How to Infer Metaphysics from Scientific Practice as a Biologist Might’, takes up the question of how to evaluate inferences from practices to metaphysics. He fruitfully uses methods that biologists employ for determining whether organisms are adapted to their environment, to evaluate whether practices are ‘fit for a purpose’. This chapter is one of the places the practice turn and pragmatism seem to be at work.

Richard Creath’s ‘What Was Carnap Rejecting When He Rejected Metaphysics?’ explores how Rudolf Carnap both opposed and was sympathetic towards metaphysics. This takes the reader through a fascinating episode of intellectual history, in which Henri Bergson was critical of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Carnap rejects Bergson’s criticisms in part because they depend on an epistemically unmoored methodology, but also because they are pragmatically fruitless. This chapter engages with scientific metaphysics, as well as a form of Carnapian pragmatism.

Oliver Lean, in his ‘Ideal Observations’, considers the ways that biological systems are understood, both causally and informationally, as well as tensions between both approaches. For example, we often think about the mind as distinctively informational but wonder how it can be unpacked in causal terms. Taking inspiration from James Woodward’s interventionist approach to causation, Lean evaluates informational claims in biology through ‘ideal observations’. This is an example of how different practices can co-exist and inform one another.

Marie Kaiser and Rose Trappes, in their ‘Individual-Level Mechanisms in Ecology and Evolution’, explore the nature of the mechanisms of niche construction, choice, and conformance. They demonstrate how the practices of researchers fit into the new mechanist approach (Machamer et al. [2000]). This is the beginning of a scientific-metaphysics approach to understanding the ontology of a group of ecologists at the Collaboratory Research Centre.

Janella Baxter, in her ‘Just How Messy Is the World?’, explores scientific pluralism about classification through the lens of the GenBank gene concept. She argues that the pluralism found in genetics is far greater than others have recognized. Additionally, the GenBank gene concept is importantly different from other gene concepts found in molecular biology and genetics. She contends that the world of genetics is much messier than other philosophers have appreciated.

Marcel Weber, in his ‘The Reduction of Classical Experimental Embryology to Molecular Developmental Biology’, examines the organizer concept in developmental biology. He argues that though it is not straightforwardly reducible to a molecular or physical structure, it nevertheless structures investigative, experimental practices vital to developmental biology. This forms what he calls an ‘interlevel investigative practice’ in which various experimental methods are used at different parts of the biological hierarchies.

Lauren Ross, in her ‘Explanation in Contexts of Causal Complexity’, considers causation in the context of psychiatric genetics. The complexity of psychiatric disorder may seem so extensive that looking for genetic causes would be hopeless. She first diagnoses the patterns of this complexity and then shows how specific strategies are pragmatically employed to better understand the genetics of these disorders.

Marc Ereshefsky and Thomas Reydon, in their ‘The Grounded Functionality Account of Natural Kinds’, offer a new ‘grounded functionality’ approach to natural kinds. First, they argues, we should evaluate the claim that something is a kind in terms of whether it satisfies the epistemic (and non-epistemic) aims of investigators. Second, the kind is natural insofar as it does not constitutively depend on us, though it may causally so depend (think of synthetic organisms).

Now that we have a description of the practice turn in the philosophy of science and its scientific metaphysics, I want to pose some questions for the view. First, as we have seen, many philosophers of science have argued that we should examine units of science beyond theories. For example, Kuhn’s paradigm arguably includes much more than theory. There are the aims, the methods, and the theories. Likewise, philosophers like Ian Hacking ([1983]) drew our attention to experiment independent of, and sometimes in tension with, theory. So, how does the practice turn compare to these views? The Kuhnian approach is structured around paradigms and their shifts, the incommensurability of core concepts, and theoretical criteria as values. These particularities may be absent from the practice turn, but it does still seem Kuhnian in spirit. So, how are they similar and how to they differ? This matters simply because the Kuhnian approach met with deep and lasting criticism since the notion of a paradigm was thought to be vague and ambiguous. One worry is that the notion of a practice is similarly vague and ambiguous.

Another question concerns the practice turn and its relationship to pragmatism. In many ways, the turn appears to accept some of the major claims of classical American pragmatism. For example, John Dewey’s ([1938]) epistemology is centred on problem solving in indeterminate situations. We find ourselves frustrated, confused, and distressed. As the result, we conceptualize these into a problem. Hypotheses are formulated as conditional plans of action. Experimentally, we determine whether things succeed as our plans suggest. Notions of truth can still operate, be it a Peircean truth-as-indefeasibility or Dewey’s warranted assertibility. Likewise, if we follow William James ([1912]) and his radical empiricism, we observe relations and dependencies, and thus can observe singular causal relations. Is the practice turn simply an updated form of pragmatism? Does it inherit the criticisms of pragmatism as well?

One area where I find myself wanting more detail is the focus on knowledge-how and skill. Biologists, like other scientists, employ enormous amounts of skill. This includes skill in the deployment, interpretation, and evaluation of theories. But it also requires specific skills in the lab and in the field. In contemporary epistemology, this emphasis on skill appears in questions about the role of practical interests in knowledge claims, the role of epistemic virtue in justification and knowledge, and whether knowledge-that is just a species of know-how. But we need more details about the forms of instrumental reasoning the practice turn recognizes. For example, suppose we have a given aim. How do we determine when a practice successfully satisfies that aim? Can aims be partially satisfied? How do we determine the fitness of purpose of the resources of a practice? What makes a tool ‘use-apt’? My worry is that the difficulty of answering these questions pushes philosophers of science back towards the traditional theory-centric approach.

Overall, this is a great collection of essays in the philosophy of biology. They are all, in different ways, engaging with scientific practice to provide a scientific metaphysics. As a reader, I found it very ‘use-apt’.

Jay Odenbaugh
Lewis and Clark College
jay@lclark.edu

References

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Hacking, I. [1983]: Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hempel, C. G.  [1965]: ‘The Logic of Functional Analysis’, in his Aspects of Scientific Explanation, New York: Free Press, pp. 297–330.

James, W. [1912]: Essays in Radical Empiricism, New York: Longman Green.

Kellert, S. H., Longino, H. E. and Waters, C. K. [2006]: Scientific Pluralism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Kuhn, T. S. [1962]: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lakatos, I. [1970]: ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 91–195.

Laudan, L. [1977]: Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Machamer, P., Darden, L. and Craver, C. F. [2000]: ‘Thinking about Mechanisms’, Philosophy of Science, 67, pp. 1–25.

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Reichenbach, H. [1956]: The Direction of Time, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Reichenbach, H. [1957]: The Philosophy of Space and Time, New York: Dover.

Soler, L., Zwart, S., Lynch, M. and Israel-Jost, V. [2014]: Science after the Practice Turn in the Philosophy, History, and Social Studies of Science, New York: Routledge.

Woodward, J. [2005]: Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yablo, S. [1998]: ‘Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 72, pp. 229–62.