Teaser
“I think that SB will still play an important role in appreciating, first of all, the explanatory relevance of systemic perspectives that hopefully will allow us to avoid reductionist and relativist perspectives or excessive simplifications driven by mere pluralistic accounts of human understanding and scientific knowledge. Therefore the irreducibility of understanding typical of different disciplines is no obstacle but a condition of an integration process of different kinds of human understanding. Moving from physics and chemistry to biological or life sciences more generally, we aim to make explicit the explanatory categories that structure explanations in these fields and to clarify the systemic and relational features of any epistemology and their specificity in the different fields.”
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Notes
- 1.
This point could open the debate on ‘Hypothesis-driven’ science. However, this discussion is far beyond the aim of this contribution.
- 2.
A. Giuliani, personal communication, cited with permission.
- 3.
Giuliani took his degree in Biological Sciences in 1982, and like other ‘optimistic people’ he started pursuing a SB road. He adopted a different perspective and new mathematical tools to argue that things are not so complex as they seem but that the problem is actually entailed in the ‘mesoscopic principles’. Denis Noble’s work should also be mentioned as it has largely inspired Giuliani’s as well as my own work. Giuliani is currently involved in the analysis of biological experimentation by multidimensional statistics, principal component analysis, and cluster analysis.
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Suggested Readings by Marta Bertolaso
Bertolaso, M. (2016). Philosophy of cancer – A dynamic and relational View. Springer.
Bertolaso, M., Giuliani, A., & Filippi, S. (2014). The mesoscopic level and its epistemological relevance in systems biology. In A. X. C. N. Valente, A. Sarkar, & Y. Gao (Eds.), Recent advances in systems biology research (pp. 19–36). Commack: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Giuliani, A., Filippi, S., & Bertolaso, M. (2014). Why network approach can promote a new way of thinking in biology. Frontiers in Genetics, 5, 83.
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Bertolaso, M. (2017). A System Approach to Cancer. From Things to Relations. In: Green, S. (eds) Philosophy of Systems Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47000-9_3
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