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Computerized Implementation of Biomedical Theory Structures: an Artificial Intelligence Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Kenneth F. Schaffner
Kenneth F. Schaffner*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

At a recent conference I attended involving physicists, biologists, historians, and sociologists, a question about the development of theory in biology in comparison with theory in physics arose, with special interest in the nature of the theorists in the two domains and where they ranked in prestige. The biologists, primarily biochemists, maintained that “theory had a bad name in contemporary biology.” As they saw it from the perspective of biochemists and bench scientists, experimental work was much more highly regarded than theoretical work in biology, in interesting contrast to physics.

Certainly not all biologists are theory averse. In the preface to the first of three volumes edited by C.H. Waddington, the late distinguished geneticist wrote in 1968 that he felt” …that the time is ripe to formulate some skeleton of concepts and methods around which Theoretical Biology can grow….

Type
Part II. Biology and Medicine
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 17 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Grateful acknowledgement is made both to the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of my research on theory structure in the biomedical sciences. I also want to thank Professors Harry Pople, Clark Glymour, and Herbert Simon for stimulating discussions about the application of artificial intelligence techniques to knowledge representation in biology and medicine.

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