A lot of people have thought of understanding as just knowledge of true causes, but then there is a problem of why we value knowledge - if not to und… - John S. Wilkins
" "A lot of people have thought of understanding as just knowledge of true causes, but then there is a problem of why we value knowledge - if not to understand things. And in effect understanding is what underwrites the desire for knowledge in the context of science.
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About John S. Wilkins
Dr John S. Wilkins works in the fields of history and philosophy of science, focusing on evolution, systematics and the concept of species. He also works on the cognitive science of religion. He gained his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2004, and has taught at the Universities of Queensland, Sydney, NSW and Melbourne.
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Additional quotes by John S. Wilkins
Generally, scientists have a “rolling wall of fog” that trails behind them at various distances for different disciplines, above which only the peaks of mountains of the Greats can be seen. In medical biology, for instance, this wall is about five years behind the present. Little is cited before that, and those works that are, are cited by nearly everyone. So there is a tendency for what Kuhn called “textbook history” to become the common property of all members of the discipline.
[Species] obey, and when they occur are post hoc explained by the biology of populations, interbreeding, selection, drift, and so on, but they are not theoretical objects, any more than planetary orbits are in physics. Species occur, and are explicable in a multiplicity of ways, but they do not follow formally from any theory of biology.
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