================= 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 [log in to unmask] http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]