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Reasoning Strategies in Molecular Biology: Abstractions, Scans and Anomalies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Lindley Darden  and
Michael Cook
Lindley Darden
Affiliation:
University of Maryland at College Park
Michael Cook
Affiliation:
Rockefeller University
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Extract

In the spring of 1994, Lindley Darden spent five months as a visitor in Joshua Lederberg's Laboratory for Molecular Genetics and Informatics (MGI) at Rockefeller University. Michael Cook is a Research Associate in the MGI Lab. This paper discusses reasoning strategies at use in that lab. In Part I, Lindley Darden recounts her experiences in the lab and discusses reasoning strategies that she observed in use there. In Part II, Michael Cook presents a technique of methodical hypothesis generation in the light of an anomaly for a model.

The reasoning strategies to be discussed in this paper are reasoning in hypothesis formation, reasoning in experimental design, and reasoning to generate hypotheses in the light of an anomaly. More specifically, the reasoning strategies may be characterized as (1) abstraction-instantiation (Darden, 1987; 1991; Darden and Cain, 1989), (2) the systematic scan (Lederberg, 1965), and (3) modular anomaly resolution (Darden, 1991; 1992; forthcoming).

Type
Part VI. Search Heuristics, Experimentation, and Technology in Molecular and Cell Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 179 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Lindley Darden's visit at Rockefeller University was supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She thanks Joshua Lederberg for making this opportunity available and for stimulating discussions during the visit. She also thanks others in the lab who were so friendly and helpful: Michael Cook, David Thaler, Sri Sastry, Greg Tombline, Raphael Stimphil, Ken Zahn, Mick Noordewier, Mary Jane Zimmermann and Joice Johnson. Michael Cook's work was supported by a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA Order No. 8145, No. MDA972-91-J-1008. They both thank Joshua Lederberg, David Thaler, Raphael Stimphil, Sri Sastry, Nancy Hall (of the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Maryland, College Park) and William Wolfe (of the Mathematics Department at the University of Colorado, Denver) for inspiring comments or specific comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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