James Griesemer
University of California, Davis, Philosophy, Faculty Member
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Accounts of the structure of scientific theories in twentieth century philosophy of science have tended to focus on epistemological questions to the near exclusion of the metaphysical consequences of their solutions. This emphasis can be... more
Accounts of the structure of scientific theories in twentieth century philosophy of science have tended to focus on epistemological questions to the near exclusion of the metaphysical consequences of their solutions. This emphasis can be understood as resulting from the interest and concerns of the logical positivist movement and continued by proponents of the so-called “received view” of theories (Suppe 1977). One area where this division of interest has been a barrier to progress is understanding the growth of scientific knowledge.While philosophers as diverse as Nagel, Hempel, Kuhn, and Lakatos have attempted to explain the historical course of science, they have largely built their views on foundations designed to explicate the relation between theories (paradigms, scientific research programs) and the world. Thus, the received view's model of progress via theory (or indeed, whole science) reduction (e.g., Nagel 1961) rests on its largely syntactic/logical account of theory structure.
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Second printing, 1991 © 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage... more
Second printing, 1991 © 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in ...
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ABSTRACT
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This article provides insights on emerging discipline of origins of life studies. It answers various questions such as the logics behind scientific concepts and the scope and limit of biological science. It is now generally accepted that... more
This article provides insights on emerging discipline of origins of life studies. It answers various questions such as the logics behind scientific concepts and the scope and limit of biological science. It is now generally accepted that life existed around 3.5 billion years ago on earth. If life began elsewhere, then the time window for life's origin might be wide open. Narrowing the gap puts the idea that there is room for God to explain the gaps in nature left by scientific uncertainty. Some fundamental heuristic principles are discussed based on continuity, microreversibility, actualism. The origin of life appeared to be a problem, when it was realized how complex the interrelations between DNA as the carrier of genetic information and protein were. Origins of life researchers use biological, chemical, and physical laboratories to challenge how life might have emerged in the harsh conditions of early Earth.
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David Hull's paper, A Mechanism and its Metaphysics, contains a very important elaboration on the growing ediface of his "scientific theory of sociocultural evolution": a specific link between his mechanism for conceptual... more
David Hull's paper, A Mechanism and its Metaphysics, contains a very important elaboration on the growing ediface of his "scientific theory of sociocultural evolution": a specific link between his mechanism for conceptual evolution and the demic or social group structure of science. In the remarks that follow I discuss this development in order to acknowledge its importance to a philosophy of conceptual change and express what I take to be a tension emerging in Hull's work stemming from his reluctance to develop a conceptual genotype/phenotype distinction and his account of the place of the demic structure of science in his mechanistic account. In a number of publications Hull (1975, 1978, 1982a, 1983a, 1983b) has pursued the theme of an evolutionary account of scientific change. He has presented a number of convincing arguments against the too hasty dismissal of the evolutionary viewpoint on grounds of apparent failure of the analogy between biology and culture, e.g., that genes are material but "memes" are not, that biological inheritance is Mendelian but cultural inheritance is Lamarckian, that scientific change is progressive while biological evolution is not (see especially Hull 1982a). However, Hull's more central concern is to develop a general account of evolution sufficient to encompass social and conceptual as well as biological change. This strategy, if successful, would yield both a dynamic theory of conceptual change and an elaboration of the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory, two major goals of philosophy of biology. Moreover, while part of his means of doing so is to reason analogically from biology, the merit of the generalized theory achieved is meant to depend on its empirical explanatory content, including facts about conceptual change in science. Hull has sketched in several places, including the present work, one of his most compelling supports for the empirical status of his evolutionary perspective: an explanation of why lying is a more serious, less frequent crime in science than stealing. The explanation is important because it uses what Hull takes to be a mechanism driving conceptual transmission to make a prediction about scientific social group behavior. According to the theory, the goal of both science and scientists is to increase empirical knowledge. Hull claims that scientists collectively can best achieve this goal by acting in their own best individual interests, that is, to seek to have their peers, and in particular their closest competitors, accept their work as their work. The best show of this acceptance is for other scientists to use the work, that is to incorporate it into their own work. Stealing another's work amounts to using it without giving credit and, as Hull repeatedly stresses, scientists want credit. Stealing thus hurts the victim of the intellectual theft by not conferring credit, though the merits of the idea do not depend on the credit going to the originator. Lying, on the other hand, hurts anyone who incorporates the lies in their work. It's bad enough that the users of the lie have to grant some credit to the liar, leaving less credit for themselves, but if the lie is found out through
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ABSTRACT I characterize Wimsatt’s approach to philosophy of science as philosophy for science and then briefly consider a theme emerging from his work that informs just one of the many current developments in philosophy of biology that he... more
ABSTRACT I characterize Wimsatt’s approach to philosophy of science as philosophy for science and then briefly consider a theme emerging from his work that informs just one of the many current developments in philosophy of biology that he inspired: scaffolding as a problem of mechanistic explanation for functionalists. KeywordsWimsatt–Reductionism–Mechanism–Heuristics–Realism–Tinkering–Scaffolding
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In "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology", Slavoj Zizek once again stares into the abyss between what to say and what they are actually saying, with assistance from his "Leni Riefenstahl", Sophie Fiennes
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... Volume15 No.1 January2000 JAMES R. GRIESEMER and MICHAEL J. WADE / Popula-tional Heritability: Extending Punnett Square Concepts to Evolution at the Metapopulation Level 1–17 ... DAVID N. STAMOS / Robert Hall Haynes, In Memoriam:... more
... Volume15 No.1 January2000 JAMES R. GRIESEMER and MICHAEL J. WADE / Popula-tional Heritability: Extending Punnett Square Concepts to Evolution at the Metapopulation Level 1–17 ... DAVID N. STAMOS / Robert Hall Haynes, In Memoriam: 1931–1998 633–639 ...
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JAMES GRIESEMER1,*, MATTHEW H. HABER1, GRANT YAMASHITA2 and LISA GANNETT3 1Department of Philosophy and Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis; 2Population Biology Graduate Group and Center for Population Biology,... more
JAMES GRIESEMER1,*, MATTHEW H. HABER1, GRANT YAMASHITA2 and LISA GANNETT3 1Department of Philosophy and Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis; 2Population Biology Graduate Group and Center for Population Biology, University ...
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Using demes from experimental metapopulations of the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we investigated phase 3 of Wright's shifting balance process. Using parent demes of high, intermediate, and low mean fitness, we... more
Using demes from experimental metapopulations of the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we investigated phase 3 of Wright's shifting balance process. Using parent demes of high, intermediate, and low mean fitness, we experimentally modeled migration of varying amounts from demes of high mean fitness into demes of lower mean fitness (like phase 3) as well as the reciprocal (the opposite of phase 3). In natural populations, some migration among demes occurs independently of deme fitness. In this case, demes of high mean fitness are likely to receive migrants from demes of lower mean fitness; these effects might limit the effectiveness of phase 3 but have not been studied experimentally. We estimated the populational heritability of mean fitness by the regression of offspring deme means on the weighted parental means and found moderate levels of demic heritability one (0.641-0.690) and two (0.518-0.552) generations after migration. We discuss our findings in relation to the role of interdemic migration in "adaptive peak shifts" in metapopulations and the controversies over group selection and the units of inheritance.
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ABSTRACT: We develop an account of laboratory models, which have been central to the group selection controversy. We compare arguments for group selection in nature with Darwin's arguments for natural selection to argue that... more
ABSTRACT: We develop an account of laboratory models, which have been central to the group selection controversy. We compare arguments for group selection in nature with Darwin's arguments for natural selection to argue that laboratory models provide impor- tant grounds for ...
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Processes of evolutionary transition (ET), becoming part of a new reproducing collective while losing the capacity of independent reproduction, seem difficult to track without circularity, since their features—units of selection,... more
Processes of evolutionary transition (ET), becoming part of a new reproducing collective while losing the capacity of independent reproduction, seem difficult to track without circularity, since their features—units of selection, individuality, inheritance at multiple levels (MLS1, MLS2)—are products of one process. We describe ET in a non-circular way, noting kinds of interactions among community members necessary for such major transitions that are not instances of those same interactions within community members. Reproducing ‘systems’ tend to hybridize with environmental components, employing eco–devo scaffolding interactions forming communities. Communities are developmentally scaffolded systems of diverse members engaged in heterogeneous interactions. They may become individuals in their own right with the potential to evolve an inheritance system at the emergent community level. We argue for the explanatory benefits of treating ‘individuality’ as a special case of ‘collectivit...
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Second printing, 1991 © 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage... more
Second printing, 1991 © 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in ...
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We track and analyze the re-situation of scientific knowledge in the field of human population genomics ancestry studies. We understand re-situation as a process of accommodating the direct or indirect transfer of objects of knowledge... more
We track and analyze the re-situation of scientific knowledge in the field of human population genomics ancestry studies. We understand re-situation as a process of accommodating the direct or indirect transfer of objects of knowledge from one site/situation to (one or many) other sites/situations. Our take on the concept borrows from Mary S. Morgan’s work on facts traveling while expanding it to include other objects of knowledge such as models, data, software, findings, and visualizations. We structure a specific case study by tracking the re-situation of these objects between three research projects studying human population diversity reported in three articles in Science, Genome Research and PLoS Genetics between 2002 and 2005. We characterize these three engagements as a unit of analysis, a “skirmish,” in order to compare: (a) the divergence of interests in how life-scientists answer similar research questions and (b) to track the challenging transformation of workflows in rese...
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... development such as ''attachment.''When a child ''attaches''to mother (placing trust in mother to ... sustenance, and reproduction of dwellers, and so play an important dynamic role as gener ...... more
... development such as ''attachment.''When a child ''attaches''to mother (placing trust in mother to ... sustenance, and reproduction of dwellers, and so play an important dynamic role as gener ... way Sears scaffolded home ownership for consumers, lowering the cost and risk of building ...
I describe a data journey drawn from a case study of research in human population genomics. The case is framed in dialogue with a project on what has been called the “re-situation” of scientific knowledge (Morgan 2014). The kind of... more
I describe a data journey drawn from a case study of research in human population genomics. The case is framed in dialogue with a project on what has been called the “re-situation” of scientific knowledge (Morgan 2014). The kind of journey described elicits a missing concept—“dataset-centric” biology—in the conversation around the emergence of “big data” and data-centric biology (Leonelli 2016) and its contrast, “traditional” or “small data” biology. I distinguish datapoint-centric from dataset-centric practices. The case study is about the development, use, and amendment of data sets in one lab’s pursuit of human genome diversity studies. I offer a model of data journeys to interpret the case. The model is comprised of three kinds of components: scientific data structures, data representations, and data journey narratives. The case study illustrates two visualizations that frame the dataset journey.
Making mice is a contribution to scientific biography, to the history of laboratory model organisms, and to the historiography of scientific standardization. The heart of the story is the development of standardized mice (i.e. genetically... more
Making mice is a contribution to scientific biography, to the history of laboratory model organisms, and to the historiography of scientific standardization. The heart of the story is the development of standardized mice (i.e. genetically inbred strains) for use in cancer research, basic mammalian genetics, and other allied lines of work. One theme is the work of learning how to create such strains through careful breeding and husbandry. Another is building the organization which can produce and distribute strains on a fairly substantial scale. This organization was (and is) both a world of volunteers and a formal bureaucracy. A third part of the story is the development of alliances with significant players and social worlds—the medical cancer research world, mouse fanciers, animal rights people, government agencies, private philanthropic foundations and individuals, the press, and consumers of biomedical products and services. Rader’s argument is organized around the story of Clar...
"Scaffolding" is a concept that is becoming widely used across disciplines. This book investigates common threads in diverse applications of scaffolding, including theoretical biology, cognitive science, social theory, science... more
"Scaffolding" is a concept that is becoming widely used across disciplines. This book investigates common threads in diverse applications of scaffolding, including theoretical biology, cognitive science, social theory, science and technology studies, and human development. Despite its widespread use, the concept of scaffolding is often given short shrift; the contributors to this volume, from a range of disciplines, offer a more fully developed analysis of scaffolding that highlights the role of temporal and temporary resources in development, broadly conceived, across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. The book emphasizes reproduction, repeated assembly, and entrenchment of heterogeneous relations, parts, and processes as a complement to neo-Darwinism in the developmentalist tradition of conceptualizing evolutionary change. After describing an integration of theoretical perspectives that can accommodate different levels of analysis and connect various methodologies, the book discusses multilevel organization; differences (and reciprocality) between individuals and institutions as units of analysis; and perspectives on development that span brains, careers, corporations, and cultural cycles. Contributors: Colin Allen, Linnda R. Caporael, James Evans, Elihu M. Gerson, Simona Ginsburg, James R. Griesemer, Christophe Heintz, Eva Jablonka, Sanjay Joshi, Shu-Chen Li, Pamela Lyon, Sergio F. Martinez, Christopher J. May, Johann Peter Murmann, Stuart A. Newman, Jeffrey C. Schank, Iddo Tavory, Georg Theiner, Barbara Hoeberg Wimsatt, William C. Wimsatt
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science,... more
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to some familiar philosophical distinctions such as fact versus value, emotion versus reason and basic versus applied science. According to Grinnell, unlike sentiment-based generalizations, a fact-based generalization traces its diverse commitments and thus becomes tractable for its audience. We argue that foregrounding tractability better explains Grinnell's practice in the context of his time as well as in the context of current discourse among scientists over the political "biases" of biodiversity research and its problem of "reproducibility."