Intro to Philosophy Perspective Module 2, Lecture 1
Title Slide
Welcome to an introduction to a philosophy perspective on biology and society.
Slide 1: What is Philosophy?
What is philosophy? Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of things, like
knowledge, reality, existence, values, mind, and the list goes on. This definition is pretty vague,
but what philosophy is and how we can use it at the intersection of biology and society should
become clearer throughout this lecture. For now, just bear in mind that philosophy aims to
understand the fundamental nature of things.
Slide 2: Branches of Philosophy
Thinking about the fundamental nature of things has occurred throughout all cultures in modern
and ancient history. And, today, philosophy, as a discipline, can be broadly divided into a series
of branches, such as aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Each of these
branches seeks to address different questions and issues.
Slide 3: Branches of Philosophy

For instance, aesthetics considers the nature of art, beauty, enjoyment, and perception. A
philosopher in this field would ask questions along the lines of: What is art? What makes
something beautiful?
Slide 4: Branches of Philosophy
We’ll look closer at ethics in the next module, so we’re skipping that one here. Metaphysics is
concerned with features of reality, like time, objects, and existence. A metaphysician would ask
questions like: what is real?
Slide 5: Branches of Philosophy
Logic is the study of reasoning and argument. Logicians tend to be concerned with things like
reference, truth, necessity, and existence. A logician would ask questions like: Does an
argument make sense?
Slide 6: Branches of Philosophy
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Finally, epistemology covers the nature of knowledge, including topics like truth, belief,
justification, and rationality. An epistemologist would ask questions like: how do we know what
we know about the world?

You may hear about all these branches of philosophy and wonder: what on Earth does this have
to do with biology? Trust me, you are not alone in your wonderment. So, let’s begin to dive into
this topic by showing how each of the branches intersects with biology.
Slide 7: Aesthetics within Biology

Within aesthetics, people consider the nature of art, beauty, and perception. Within biology,
scientists often consider the best ways to visualize their data for public consumption. Imagine
you’re a scientist with a load of data about, say, gene expression patterns within a developing
mouse embryo. You have a lot of choices to make about how to show your data within a
publication. If you’re going to show a microscopic image of the embryo, do you choose a black
background or a light one? What colors do you use to represent the genes of interest? How do
you indicate which gene expression patterns are the most important for your argument? A lot of
these choices are actually aesthetic choices, and your decisions will impact how your viewer
understands the data you are trying to represent and the argument you are trying to make with
your visualized data.
Slide 8: Metaphysics within Biology
Within metaphysics, people are concerned with the basic features of the world, asking questions
like: what is real? And, how is reality shaped by our perception? Scientists face the same
questions every day in the lab. When you’re running an experiment and something unexpected
pops up in your data, you have to ask yourself: is this real or is this a by-product of the method?
Here’s a more specific example: Scientists who work with understanding the boundaries of
species have to constantly ask themselves: What is a species? Are the things that I’m putting
together within a species taxon actual natural units, or are they a product of my own biases?
Slide 9: Logic within Biology
Within logic, people are concerned about reasoning and arguments, and you’d better hope that
scientists are as well. When you read a scientific paper, you’re trying to parse out the argument
that the authors are making. What conclusion do they reach, and do their statements support
such a conclusion? Does the argument make sense?
Slide 10: Epistemology within Biology
Within epistemology, people are concerned about the nature of knowledge, asking: how do we
know what we know about the world? Within biology, scientists frequently ask the same
question, sometimes without even knowing it. Imagine you’re a scientist reading the latest
Nature paper in your field. You look at the data and the conclusions that the authors reach. You
want to know how the authors are supporting their argument. You may ask questions like: is
there good reason to believe that the authors have reached the appropriate conclusion? What
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gets to count as evidence for such a conclusion? What assumptions have the authors made? All
of these questions get at parts of understanding how the authors of that Nature paper know
what they know about their topic.

So, all fields of philosophy have intersections with biology, and biologists draw from different
aspects of philosophy throughout the course of their research. But, we don’t have the time to dig
into each–you can certainly do that within other courses. For our purposes, we’re going to focus
on the intersection of epistemology and biology, asking: how can epistemology be used within
biology both to dissect and to strengthen scientific claims?
Slide 11: Understanding Epistemology within Biology
Now, if you start taking a look at philosophy papers about epistemology of science, you’re going
to run into a whole lot of potential confusion. Over the past few Millennia, philosophers have
been thinking about that driving question of epistemology and coming up with all sorts of
different ways to clarify how we can understand our knowledge of the natural world.

Within modern biology, while fields like genetics, ecology, or taxonomy may differ in terms of the
methods they use to investigate things like genomes, ecosystems, or organisms, they generally
agree that the way to investigate these things is through our experiences–that is what we can
perceive with our senses.

This way of understanding what we know about the world, or epistemological position, is called
empiricism, and it was developed in the 17th century by the English philosopher, John Locke.
Empiricism is the idea that all reliable knowledge about the world is gained through experience,
and experience is understood as what we can perceive through our senses, like sight, sound,
smell, taste, and touch. Knowledge derived from experience is known by the Latin phrase, a
posteriori.

The idea of empiricism was developed to counter the idea of rationalism, which was developed
in the 17th century by the French philosopher, René Descartes. Descartes thought that our
senses were not reliable sources of information about the world, and so, could not serve as the
basis for knowledge. Instead, Descartes believed that knowledge could and should be derived
from pure reason–from thinking and forming judgements through logic. Knowledge derived
from reason, rather than experience, is known by the Latin phrase, a priori.

Empiricism became the basis of the scientific method–the entire system of hypothesis-testing
that the scientific method entails is based on observation and experiencing the world through
our senses. However, there are quite a few limits to empiricism that various philosophers have
pointed out over time.

Despite these limits, know that, within biology today, when we want to make claims about
knowledge of the natural world, these claims are very much grounded in empiricism. Think
about any biology paper you’ve ever read–whenever a scientist wants to make a claim about
something, it is almost always a claim that is based on things that they have observed.
Slide 12: Applying Epistemology within Biology
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Thus far we’ve seen that there are a bunch of different branches of philosophy that come into
play within biology, and that epistemology, in particular, empiricism, is critical for biology. So,
let’s take a step back and ask: what does an applied epistemological perspective of biology look
like? Put another way, how can epistemology be used within biology both to dissect and to
strengthen scientific claims?

Know upfront that there is no standard method for using epistemology to dissect knowledge
within biology. There are, however, questions that we can ask whenever we come across a
knowledge claim within biology that help us get to the big point of epistemology, which you’ll
recall is understanding how we know what we know about the natural world. These questions
are framed in a way such that you could ask them about any scientific paper, but if you are a
practicing scientist, you could just as easily ask them about your own experiments.

Our big question for epistemology is: What assumptions are the scientist(s) making?

There are ALWAYS assumptions within science. Some of them are implicit, some are explicit,
but they are always there.

Once you figure out what assumptions the scientists are making, you can begin to ask other
questions like: Are these assumptions problematic?

Take note of these questions because in the next lecture we’re going to see how they can be
applied within a given case of genome editing. You can find these questions within the learning
materials.
Slide 13: Why is Philosophy Important to Science?
Before we move on to applying epistemology within biology, I have one more important question
to address: Why is philosophy important to science, and why is it important to understanding the
intersection of biology and society?

There are at least four big reasons that philosophy is important to and within science.

First, philosophy can offer conceptual clarification.

Second, philosophy can allow us to critically assess scientific assumptions and methods.

Third, philosophy can help us formulate and develop new concepts and theories.

And fourth, philosophy can help us to foster a dialogue between different sciences, as well as
between science and society.