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Dr Evelyn Fox-Keller on Epistemological Culture
17th January 2006
Eminent MIT Professor of history and philosophy of science Dr Evelyn Fox Keller spoke at an AKU-ISMC lunch-hour seminar on epistemological cultures, focusing on examples from the life sciences and exploring what satisfies the human need to understand the universe.
Keller is both a scientist and a philosopher of science, and therefore offers a unique approach to the field of epistemology. Her work has focused on the history and philosophy of biology and on gender and science.
In her book, Making Sense of Life, Keller introduces the concept of epistemological cultures and explores what provides explanatory satisfaction as far as the understanding of the universe is concerned. Out of this, she examines the conclusion that what explanatory satisfaction entails is not a universal value - in fact, it varies across time, cultures and disciplines. Scientific explanations enable prediction and control. However, there is often an asymmetrical definition of what constitutes 'atheoretical and theoretical' and 'scientific and non-scientific' when exploring these questions.
"This response that we accepted in the 1960s became steadily undermined over the years since then, it assumes a clear unambiguous and stable distinction between scientific and non-scientific . a trans-historical, trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary meaning of that distinction, which is untenable."
Keller described the importance of understanding that the notion of what is being predicted and controlled is also relative, and has an impact on the manner in which science is produced. The very values on which prediction and control are based require examination, especially in terms of the weighting that is placed on mathematical research.
Providing a contemporary example, Keller referred to a book by psychologist John Gottman, The Mathematics of Marriage, in which the author observed married couples in interaction and found an empirical way of predicting which marriages would last and which marriages would break down.
"He teamed up with a couple of mathematicians, and they developed these mathematical models, marital dynamics which reproduced their predictions. And now he was satisfied - now he had produced science. He had a theory in social science to rival Newton 's theory in the physical sciences because it was mathematical."
Keller expressed her view that in doing so, the author had not produced a work of originality, but had just articulated information in a different format. She continued, stating that through Gottman's work there was no addition of value to the subject; it simply sought legitimacy through the historical credence placed on mathematics.
"This illusion or difference gets precisely at the heart of my concern - how does the criteria for what is to count as a scientific explanation of any particular phenomenon vary. How do they vary across time, across cultures and across disciplines?"
Keller provided examples of the Russian Physicist Nicolas Rashevsky and the British scientist Alan Turing, exploring the explanatory value of the theories that they developed. In the 1930s, Rashevsky developed a theory that likened cell division to droplet formation. However, due to the lack of mathematical grounding of his theory, it was not accepted in scientific circles at the time. According to Keller, this exemplified the fact that although mathematics has a place in the overall study of populations and statistics, it is not an exclusively important method for exploring individual organisms. Even at its most useful, she said, mathematics' most important ability is to be able to find out the conditions and variables necessary for growth.
"It is futile to conjure up, in the imagination, a system of differential equations for the purpose of accounting for facts that are not only very complex, but also largely unknown. What we require at the present time is more measurement and less theory."
Keller's second example concerned the British mathematician Alan Turing, who acknowledged the model of a made up equation as providing some help in providing real biological form, stressing that models in the mathematical sciences act as analogies. In this respect, Turing described mathematical models in the life sciences as being based on imagination, rather than observation.
Keller explained that the task of science could best be described as exploring how best to gain access to nature's secrets. In this regard, she said, only when the process is hidden from view can we find recourse in reflection and speculation in seeing with the mind's eye. It is nature's obscurity that obliges us to create schemes of observation for that which we can not literally observe.
Providing philosophical insight into the biological sciences, Keller referred to the questions - is there any depth to meaning without understanding, and what does understanding mean? A question that is often absent from the physical sciences is whether understanding entails observing with the mind's eye or the actual eye.
In conclusion, Keller proposed the hypothesis that we will have satisfactory answers to nature's phenomenon only when we can actually watch development with our own eyes. When this is the case, will we require a theoretical or mathematical account? She continued by explaining that this was an illustration of difference between the life sciences and physics. By raising these questions, Keller said, her aim was to provide examples of differences between epistemological cultures - not just on a disciplinary level, but between nations and even on an inter-cultural level.
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