The Critical Rationalist Vol. 02 No. 03 ISSN: 1393-3809 15-Sep-1997
2 Components of the Problem
ContentContext, Fungibility and Disproof
(1) I am a biologist. While teaching biology, especially reproductive and evolutionary biology, at the University of Birmingham I promoted, and taught, a Philosophy of Science course: Bacon, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos with asides to Waddington, Lysenko, and warnings about naive DNA preformationism. Our best students enjoyed even this amateur approach, but were unfamiliar with many of the classical Physics examples like Michelson-Morley or even Newton v. Einstein. These classical examples do not translate into Biology at all well; the quasi-biological ones are worse: black-versus-white swans becomes a simple problem of taxonomy, not an issue of disproof. The interesting issues were, I thought, common to biological science and physical science, and I felt that my teaching (for Popper, mostly from Conjectures and Refutations, 1963a) was inadequately based because the students didn't seem to take the physics examples into their biology. Now I believe that there are real problems within this transfer; further, I believe that the biological arguments must spread back into physics and raise questions about the classical physics examples themselves, about naive disproof arguments in science generally.
2 Components of the Problem
ContentContext, Fungibility and Disproof
The Critical Rationalist Vol. 02 No. 03 ISSN: 1393-3809 15-Sep-1997
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TCR Issue Timestamp: Mon Sep 15 19:14:01 GMT 1997