Abstract
My concern in this paper will be with Darwin’s discovery of his theory of evolution, particularly the part centered on its mechanisms. What I want to know is whether knowledge of Darwin’s route to discovery tells us something about the finished theory, say as it is found in the first edition of The Origin of Species (1859). Do we, as philosophers, need to know how Darwin got his theory in order to understand his theory? I take it that there is a school of philosophical thought, ‘logical empiricism’, that would argue that essentially a scientist’s route to discovery is irrelevant to his or her finished product. A scientific theory or hypothesis is in some sense intended to be a reflection of reality. Hence, that a scientist may have gotten his ideas after years of painstaking fitting of the data to possible ideas, like Kepler, or in a flash through mystical contemplation of his navel, is of absolutely no concern.1 Even if Archimedes had never taken a bath in his life, his principle would still have been the same.
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Ruse, M. (1980). Ought Philosophers Consider Scientific Discovery? A Darwinian Case-Study. In: Nickles, T. (eds) Scientific Discovery: Case Studies. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 60. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9015-9_8
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