A new spontaneous biomed/biotech epistemology?
When I took my undergraduate courses in philosophy of science, the general dogma — laid down by mid-20th century philosophers and historians of science like Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn — was that logical empiricism was naïve and that the experimental sciences were thoroughly theory-laden. Post-Kuhnian science studies didn’t change this epistemological dogma; surely the Edinburgh school opened the black-box of scientific practice and actor network theorists eschewed epistemological issues altogether, but for the last fifty years or so nobody has ever really suggested that science might be an basically observation (data) driven enterprise.
But there are many signs that biomed/biotech practitioners are about to work out a new spontaneous philosophy of science. The whole jargon of systems biology (’robust’ data, ‘high throughput analysis’) is based on the notion that hypotheses and theories can somehow be harvested from observational data. And in the editorial of the last issue (#2, 27 April 2007) of Lab Times, Craig Wenter’s recent large-scale collection of ocean bacterial genomic DNA is defended against critics who have suggested that such data hoovering is mindless because it doesn’t have the solution of any specific scientific problems in mind. In the editors’ words:
Science isn’t and has never been only hypothesis-based, as some of the high priesthoods of science would desparately have us believe. Science always starts with observaton and description, and only later proceeds by building and testing hypothesis based on the described.
Interesting! A CERN physicist would probably never reason like this. But Lab Time’s editors are presumably tuned in with their peers. Are we witnessing a return to inductivism in the life sciences? And what does this aggressive language use (’high priesthoods’, ‘desperately’) signal?
29 May 2007 Thomas
Interesting! And isn’t Venter’s new project really cool!
But I don’t agree it being a physics vs. biology thing. In astronomy, for instance, there are these large survey projects going on all the time. They don’t get much publicity from philosophers of science, but they are nevertheless an important part of astronomy and astrophysics.
Do these astronomy survey projects also subscribe to a spontaneous inductivist philosophy of science?
And YES — I think Venter’s project is extraordinarily cool! In addition to surveying the oceans for vast amounts of new bacterial genomes he is also involved in creating life! A true maverick!
I don’t know for sure (someone ought to investigate!), but suspect that it would be quite easy to find inductivism there, a kind of “let’s look and see what we find, classify”; the natural history of the heavens, like Venter trawling the oceans.
Classical work are, of course, the Herschels’ surveys, Dreyer’s NGC, the Bonner Durchmusterung, the photographic Harvard Sky Patrol; more recent work include the first Palomar Sky Surveys (financed by the National Geogr Soc) and second dito, the UGC, the 3C, the Uhuru catalogue, the IRAS Survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey &c.
Stuff we didn’t know existed were found in these surveys, whole new classes of objects. Perhaps it is not very fruitful to debate whether theory or data is first, but I think for sure you could say that some parts of modern astronomy is kind of data driven.
I guess these projects don’t get as much publicity as they ought to, perhaps because they don’t fit in with some of the dogmas of philosophy of science.
As to Venter, I read The Genome War by James Shreeve; a popularization with no evidence of the author having been exposed to whatever it is that we are doing in history of science/med/tech or STS - and a bit one-sided view of the conflict between Venter and the other side, isn’t it? -, but a fun read anyway.
Wish someone would write something about the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition.
I should add that I’m not necessarily critical of the bottom-up data harvesting approach. As you say, it leads to findings nobody would have expected.
I was also thinking of the analogies with the former structuralist and poststructuralist ‘theory’ hegemony in literary studies and the current movement in the humanities to restore the possibility of more innocent readings of literature — wasn’t it by the way Althusser (does anyone read him any more?) who proposed that innocent reasdings were impossible?
The argument against this (post)structuralist anti-innocent-reading stance is, of course, that it precludes the possibility for us to be surprised by the text.