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Darwin's Long and Short Arguments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Matti Sintonen
Matti Sintonen*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, The Academy of Finland
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Abstract

Doren Recker has criticized the prevailing accounts of Darwin's argument for the theory of natural selection in the Origin of Species. In this note I argue that Recker fails to distinguish between a deductive short argument for the principle of natural selection, and a non-deductive, long argument which aims at establishing that the principle has explanatory power in the various domains of application. I shall try to show that the semantic view of theories, especially in its structuralist form, makes it easy to distinguish between the two arguments and to explain how Darwin's long argument counts as one argument. I also raise a question about Recker's views on Darwin's mid-Victorian background, arguing that Newton's First Rule of Reasoning was not just a constraint on hypotheses involving unobservables, but a general request to keep conjecture and certainty apart.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 677 - 689
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This discussion was written during my stay as a Fulbright Fellow in the Boston Center for the Philosophy and History of Science. I wish to thank the Finland-U.S. Educational Exchange Commission for financial support, and Boston University for its hospitality during the stay. I also want to thank two anonymous reviewers for Philosophy of Science for detailed criticisms and constructive suggestions.

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