Stotz and Griffiths, Biohumanities
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counterexamples to each definition can so easily be found, simply by choosing examples
that make the other cue(s) salient.
2.3. The Philosopher as Ecologist
One motivation for the two empirical studies just described was to transcend the
limitations of traditional conceptual analysis. The traditional method of devising a series
of ingenious thought experiments too often ends with the 'dull thud of conflicting
intuitions'. Experimental philosophy has the capacity to assess competing analyses
against data and to avoid biases introduced by working with a single subdiscipline or a
single school of thought in the science to be studied.
Such philosophy `in the trenches' is in a privileged position to provide the bridge
between philosophy and science, since its aim to provide biological knowledge unites it
with the science itself. At least part of philosophy of science has abandoned the idea that
its job is to enforce rigor and precision within science through the stablization and
disambiguation of scientific meanings. Equally gone is Paul Feyerabend's conceptual
anarchism, in which the history of science is little more than a series of changes in the
fashionable topics of scientific discussion (Feyerabend, 1975). In place of these two
models we have come to appreciate that conceptual change in science is rationally
motivated by what scientists are trying to achieve, by their accumulated experience of
how to achieve it, and by changes in what they are trying to achieve. Empirical science is
a powerhouse of conceptual innovation. The gene concept is a case in point: in its century
of existence the gene has been redefined many times, often radically. This makes sense if