A context I remember is Darwin politely raising an eyebrow in Herbert Spencer's direction by calling himself a naturalist. Spencer could claim the label philosopher, but was in no sense a scientist as we'd use the term now.
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It interests me that—although Darwin was a philosopher of science of the first rank—one of his favorite put-downs was to suggest that someone else was engaged in philosophy, or worse, “metaphysics.” He would purport not to have the temperament for such abstruse speculations.
The dominant view at the time was that scientific explanation involves subsuming phenomena under invariant laws of nature. D tried to make that project work, but he couldn’t, and he had to build a radically different conception of what explanation looks like. Sounds like #philsci to me.
This thread made me think a little bit more and I confess my view is that Darwin had to reject notion of invariant laws in biology only because the proper invariant biological laws hadn't been expounded. But in the messiness and difference of his cases, isn't there the same kind of principle...
is differential reproductive success or survival of the fittest an empirical claim or is it a definition? Seems like a definition to me.
(sometimes I forget that I have Kantian sympathies, that I do love a good synthetic apriori story 😅)
For me, what’s most interesting in D’s science is not natural selection (or SotF) but the realization that causation in living systems is plural, complex, and profoundly historical, in the sense that the history of the system has causal power to affect its dynamics. That’s why invariant laws failed.
Though you gotta say it served him well! Spencer's stock collapsed rapidly, whereas it's hard to deny Darwin took little creatures seriously and knew a lot.
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(sometimes I forget that I have Kantian sympathies, that I do love a good synthetic apriori story 😅)