Abstract
In this chapter, opinions for and against the relevance of philosophy of science to the study of interdisciplinarity are discussed. To some the relevance of philosophy may seem so obvious that it is hardly worth discussing. Others are of different opinion, though. Some arguments of the latter group are presented as well as some philosophical examples which speak strongly in favour of the former position.
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Notes
- 1.
Though a number of other philosophers(!), for example Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, Quine, and Hanson, also made their influence count (Brown 1984, p. 12).
- 2.
To be fair, in the afterword of the second edition of Laboratory Life Latour and Woolgar do admit that some parts of philosophy may not be entirely irrelevant after all (1986, p. 279 ff.).
- 3.
Straw man or not, among other interesting effects the topic stimulated a quite entertaining exchange of verbal blows between David Bloor and Larry Laudan (see Brown 1984).
- 4.
“[W]e have no articulated methodologies for [evaluating] interdisciplinary work, not even anything so vague and general as the filtered-down versions of good scientific method we are taught at school” (Cartwright 1999, p. 18).
- 5.
Even if one were to accept the quite controversial claim that epigenetics somehow rehabilitates Lamarck, this does not seem to help Freud. The nature of the acquired traits his theory presupposed as inheritable are more similar to the development of the long necks of giraffes than to gene expressions increasing the likelihood of obesity in offspring (Penny 2015).
- 6.
Which I deal with in detail in Chap. 6.
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Hvidtfeldt, R. (2018). The Relevance of Philosophy. In: The Structure of Interdisciplinary Science. New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90872-4_4
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