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Article ID: CBB972800240

What was historical about natural history? Contingency and explanation in the science of living things (2016)

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 58
Pages: 8-16

URI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615001855

DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.012

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Discipline formation Evolution Contingency (philosophy) Natural history History as a discipline; chronology; study of the past Historical method Explanation; hypotheses; theories Biology 19th century

There is a long-standing distinction in Western thought between scientific and historical modes of explanation. According to Aristotle's influential account of scientific knowledge there cannot be an explanatory science of what is contingent and accidental, such things being the purview of a descriptive history. This distinction between scientia and historia continued to inform assumptions about scientific explanation into the nineteenth century and is particularly significant when considering the emergence of biology and its displacement of the more traditional discipline of natural history. One of the consequences of this nineteenth-century transition was that while modern evolutionary theory retained significant, if often implicit, historical components, these were often overlooked as evolutionary biology sought to accommodate itself to a model of scientific explanation that involved appeals to laws of nature. These scientific aspirations of evolutionary biology sometimes sit uncomfortably with its historical dimension. This tension lies beneath recent philosophical critiques of evolutionary theory and its modes of explanation. Such critiques, however, overlook the fact that there are legitimate modes of historical explanation that do not require recourse to laws of nature. But responding to these criticisms calls for a more explicit recognition of the affinities between evolutionary biology and history.

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