Reduction And Related Problems: Reflection On The Philosophy Of Biology

Reductionism as an explicit thesis about intertheoretical explanation emerged withthe logical positivists or logical empiricists and their successors. But biologistscontend that reductionism maybe has some great success in physics and chemistry,however, has contributed little to our understanding of the most important biologicalproblems. The reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular genetics is one of thefirst topics to be discussed in the philosophy of biology. From then on the fielddeveloped rapidly.The problems of reduction in biology have been the subject of much writing anddiscussion in recent years. However, different from the majority of anti-reductionists,this study is not unfolds the critique on the reduction of biology, even not try to makea final conclusion on whether reductionism is make sense in the field of philosophy ofbiology at all.The adoption of reductionism has important implications for the researchprogramme of biology. The study is aimed at making some kind of limits which cangive the adoption for the application of reductionism in biology. The efforts would behelpful to find the new approaches on the study of philosophy of science.To consider these issues, the study discusses the problems in reduction in the sight ofbiology of philosophy as following three levels:(1) Systematize the content, principles and methods of reductionism and distinguishthe different domains of questions on reduction. Reductionism is a complextheoretical system of philosophy, many philosophers and biologists have made avariety of classification. The research on different domains arise different questionsand the given conclusions really does make a great difference. Carefully to distinguishthem, many omissions and misunderstandings can be avoided.(2) Analyze the application of reductionism in biology, in order to find theobstacles when using reductionism to solve the biological problems. There are manysubdisciplines in biology, this study focus on the problems of reduction in some main subdisciplines just like genetics, evolutionary biology and molecular biology, othersubdisciplines like ecology, physiology will not mentioned but not specificallycovered.(3) Then, an attempt to clarify the difference between biology and other scientificdisciplines is made, which establishes the particularity of biology, and find a morereasonable approach to develop the discipline of biology. At the same time,philosophy of biology can provide the unique scope of philosophy of science bystudying the problems of reduction, which can complement and develop the traditionaltheory on philosophy of science.At the end of the article, three directions worth considering have put forward todevelop the philosophy of biology as following: philosophy of biology should (1)focus on the establishment of the concepts rather than the development of law;(2)attach great importance to the descriptiveness of theory rather than regularity;(3)clear the complexity of biological system rather than emphasis on the unity of science.