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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:19:17 2006 |
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================= HES POSTING =================
Ross's remarks about the role of historical reflection in the effort to
make conceptual progress in a discipline with argumentative or explanatory
failings (as in moral philosophy and contemporary neoclassical economics)
are quite helpful, most centrally his point about the role of historical
deliberation in the task of recasting the problem which asks to be
understood within a discipline. Indeed, this task for historical narrative
and investigation can play a central role in the advance of even very
healthy explanatory and argumentative programs, as it does (as I've
discussed before) in Darwinian biology. It is important to notice that
this is a function that historical reflection plays in Darwinian biology
and economics, but _not_ in physics or bio-chemistry, where the problems
are quite simple and do not implicate human categories and perceptual
categories in the way that teleological categories in Darwinian biology and
economics are implicated (on this subject, see my recent HES paper "The
Significance of Myth and Misunderstanding in Social Science Narrative" and
my working paper "Insuperable Limits to Reduction in Biology", both
available from the site on the Web). It is the special advantage of the
contemporary Darwinian biologist on the cutting edge of theoretical advance
in his or her subject over the, say cultural historian or normally
competent household biologist, that these cutting edge theorists are
cutting edge in part because of their superior grasp and ability to make
advances within the relm of the problems to be understood. This is one
dimension that makes Ernst Mayr,
Michael Ghilselin, and David Hull so superior when it comes to providing
cutting edge advances in the history of Darwinian biology, whether this is
rather contemporary history, or history back to the time of the Greeks in
biology. No one pursues history without the focus of interests and
questions. Because theorists on the cutting edge of advancing
understanding in Darwinian biology are also on the cutting edge of raising
questions about what is to be understood, they also are on the cutting edge
of providing historical narratives about the significance of past
successess and failures, and the character how past figures approached
things -- the way they views things as problems to be answered and
understood.
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
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http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm
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