Life Sciences

The "Department Archive for History of Science" consists of five collections:
1. The administration archive. ( to collect and to document the history of the NHMW )
2. The collection of letters and bequests (Letters and part bequests)
3. The picture collection
4. The photograph - und glass plate negative collection ( photos und glass plates)
5. The collection of busts, small dioramas, object sources, as far as they don’t belong
to collection 1. or 2., e.g. early microscopic slides by emperor Ferdinand I.

This page provides information about internet resources (persons, institutes, groups and journals) on research into the nature of the biological sciences, their theoretical foundations, general theoretical biology, and related areas of research. Please help to make this site as useful as possible!

In 1934 Popper published what many regard as his Magnum Opus The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The famous chemist Wachtershauser said that this is a "gem" and that it liberated him from a sterile accounting view of science. Wachtershauser subsequently went on to develop one of the main theories of the origin of life. Frank Tipler, the famous cosmologist, regards this as the most important book this century. In one majestic and systematic attack, psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism are swept away and replaced by a set of methodological rules called Falsificationism. Falsificationism is the idea that science advances by unjustified, exaggerated guesses followed by unstinting criticism. Only hypotheses capable of clashing with observation reports are allowed to count as scientific. "Gold is soluble in hydrochloric acid" is scientific (though false); "Some homeopathic medicine does work" is, taken on its own, unscientific (though possibly true). The first is scientific because we can eliminate it if it is false; the second is unscientific because even if it were false we could not get rid of it by confronting it with an observation report that contradicted it. Unfalsifiable theories are like the computer programs with no uninstall option that just clog up the computer's precious storage space. Falsifiable theories, on the other hand, enhance our control over error while expanding the richness of what we can say about the world.

Introduction
According to Kuhn (1970), a scientific discipline can develop in two qualitatively distinct ways. During periods of normal science knowledge grows cumulatively but in times of revolutions progress will be non-cumulative.
Every scientific discipline starts with a preparadigmatic stage. This will be described in section 1. A stage of normal science will be reached when one paradigm becomes prominent. Normal science is by nature paradigm based. Normal science will be encountered in section 2. Inevitably, every normal scientific period will sooner or later result in a crisis. Section 3 will be about scientific crises. One possible result of a scientific crisis is a revolutionary change towards a new paradigm. Revolutions are described in section 4. According to Kuhn, a revolutionary change is far from cumulative. There exists incommensurability between the old and the new paradigm. The last section of this paper, section 5, will be about incommensurability.

The Philosophy of Science Association aims to further studies and free discussion from diverse standpoints in the field of philosophy of science. To this end, the PSA engages in activities such as: the publishing of periodicals, essays and monographs in this field; sponsoring conventions and meetings; and the awarding of prizes for distinguished work in the field.

A few miles farther on, we came to a big, gravelly roadcut that looked like an ashfall, a mudflow, glacial till, and fresh oatmeal, imperfectly blended. "I don't know what this glop is," [Kenneth Deffeyes] said, in final capitulation. "You need a new geologist. You need a Californian."
John McPhee, Assembling California, p. 11 [The Noonday Press; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993]

On this Home Page you will find various kinds of information, such as bibliographies, announcements of our annual meeting and the closing date for applications to our issues.

For an insight into trends and fads in the humanities world, it is hard to improve on the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. It lists all citations in the major humanities journals—that is, an army of trained slaves keys in every footnote of every article and the computer rearranges them according to the work cited. The compilers of the index examined the records for the years 1976–1983, and issued a report on the most cited works of the twentieth century. The most cited author was Lenin, which speaks volumes on the state of the humanities in the West towards the end of the Cold War. But the most cited single works were, in reverse order: in third place, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism; second, Joyce’s Ulysses; and, well in the lead, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Thomas Kuhn has been criticized for espousing a theory of scientific development inconsistent with the "natural" view that successive scientific theories draw closer and closer to the truth. The alleged problem with Kuhn's account is that it depends on an incorrect account of scientific language. Further, some critics have claimed that the natural view of scientific progress can be vindicated if scientific language is understood in terms of the causal theory of reference.
In this paper, I argue that such efforts to uphold the natural view of progress fail. The problem with current versions of the causal theory is that they leave us with no way of classifying episodes in the history of science as progressive. Advocates of the causal theory have tried enriching the basic account with maxims like the principle of charity or the principle of humanity. However, I show that these principles are unsuited to the tasks for which they were intended. Finally, I show that accounts of scientific language like those built on the causal theory of reference need to be informed by empirical psychology in order to serve in our classification of historical episodes as progressive or not. But to strengthen an account of language in this way is, in a sense, to abandon the program of antipsychologism prevalent in the philosophy of language since Frege.

I want to look at some of the problems with the positivist half of the positivism - hermeneutics dichotomy and show that it is becoming less important in human inquiry. The problem is the inherent assumption that positivism gives a good account of the natural sciences. There is plenty of evidence that this is not the case. I also want to look at some of the ideas regarding the relationship of knowledge to power. Finally I will address what I think are the 'most potent foes' of the advancement of knowledge.
To begin with it is difficult to get an idea of what positivism is. Lincoln and Guba (1985, pp.19-28) cover the subject comprehensively, summarizing the work of a number of writers. In their summary they say that the positivist approach advocates deterministic and reductionist solutions. Let's take a quick look at these aspects of positivism in the contemporary natural sciences