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Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and
Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of
foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume
is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on
the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits
of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does
it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new
knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here,
authored by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus
on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature,
such as causation, explanation, modeling, and scientific inference.
These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these
traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and
results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical
science: basic research, translational and clinical research, and
clinical practice.
Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and
Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of
foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume
is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on
the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits
of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does
it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new
knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here,
authored by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus
on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature,
such as causation, explanation, modeling, and scientific inference.
These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these
traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and
results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical
science: basic research, translational and clinical research, and
clinical practice.
Textbooks and other popular venues commonly present science as a
progressive "brick-by-brick" accumulation of knowledge and facts.
Despite its hallowed history and familiar ring, this depiction is
nowadays rejected by most specialists. There currently are two
competing models of the scientific enterprise: reductionism and
antireductionism. Neither provides an accurate depiction of the
productive interaction between knowledge and ignorance, supplanting
the old metaphor of the "wall" of knowledge. This book explores an
original conception of the nature and advancement of science. Marco
J. Nathan's proposed shift brings attention to a prominent, albeit
often neglected, construct-the black box-which underlies a
well-oiled technique for incorporating a productive role of
ignorance and failure into the acquisition of empirical knowledge.
The black box is a metaphorical term used by scientists for the
isolation of a complex phenomenon that they have deliberately set
aside or may not yet fully understand. What is a black box? How
does it work? How do we construct one? How do we determine what to
include and what to leave out? What role do boxes play in
contemporary scientific practice? Nathan's monograph develops an
overarching framework for thinking about black boxes and discusses
prominent historical cases that used it, including Darwin's view of
inheritance in his theory of evolution and the "stimulus-response
model" in psychology, among others. By detailing some fascinating
episodes in the history of biology, psychology, and economics,
Nathan revisits foundational questions about causation,
explanation, emergence, and progress, showing how the insights of
both reductionism and antireductionism can be reconciled into a
fresh and exciting approach to science.
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