Specialisation by Value Divergence: The Role of Epistemic Values in the Branching of Scientific Disciplines

ABSTRACT

According to Kuhn's speciation analogy, scientific specialisation is fundamentally analogous to biological speciation. In this paper, we extend Kuhn's original language-centred formulation of the speciation analogy, to account for episodes of scientific specialisation centred around methodological differences. Building upon recent views in evolutionary biology about the process of speciation by genetic divergence, we will show how these methodology-centred episodes of scientific specialisation can be understood as cases of specialisation driven by value divergence. We will apply our model of specialisation by value divergence to an episode of methodology-centred scientific specialisation: the emergence of molecular biology.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors of this special issue, Yafeng Shan and Vincenzo Politi, for inviting us to contribute to this issue. We are moreover indebted to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments that improved a previous draft of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, (Rheinberger 1997; Solomon 2001; Chang 2012, 2013; Shan 2020b).

2 Examples of critical discussion of incommensurability as a threat to scientific rationality and realism are (Shapere 1966; Lakatos and Musgrave 1970; Stegmüller 1976; Kitcher 1978; Lakatos 1978; Laudan 1981; Psillos 1999; Friedman 2001).

3 The exact distinction between different kinds of incommensurability is a subject of contention among Kuhn scholars (cf. Hoyningen-Huene 1993; Sankey 1994; Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey 2001; Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene 2018). Here we blur certain distinctions between different versions of semantic incommensurability in order to focus instead on the difference between semantic kinds and methodological kinds of incommensurability.

4 It should be noted that the precise meaning and ontological status of ‘world’ in Kuhn and in particular in Kuhn's niche-construction analogy is a subject of controversy in Kuhn scholarship. For different takes on the matter, see, for instance, Hoyningen-Huene (1993), Bird (2000) and De Benedetto and Luchetti (forthcoming).

5 This active role of scientists' epistemic activities in modifying the external environmental pressures of scientific development is also stressed by Haufe (2022), in his evolutionary account of scientific development. Despite a similar reliance on an analogy with niche construction and genetic divergence theories, our account radically diverges from his in that our focus is mainly on the role of epistemic values and on the related, crucial feedback-loop mechanism behind scientists' niche-constructing activities.

6 Note that this analogy between niche-construction and a scientific community's worldview construction is different from (yet compatible with) Kuhn's original niche-construction analogy, with which we opened this section. For details about the interrelationship between these two analogies, see De Benedetto and Luchetti (forthcoming).

7 For historical accounts of the emergence of molecular biology, see (Fischer and Lipson 1988; Olby 1990, 1994; Judson 1996; Rheinberger 1997; Morange 1998; de Chadarevian 2002; Witkowski 2005; van Holde and Zlatanova 2018).