A Brief Description of My Work

Taking An Anti-Reductionist Turn

My title is shamelessly derived from 'Taking the Naturalistic Turn' written by my friend Werner Callebaut.

Philosophers of science have tended to ignore the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general.

It is important for philosophy to be relevant – and also intelligible.

'Philosophy is often a matter of finding a suitable context in which to say the obvious.'

Iris Murdoch

'The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.'

Bertrand Russell

In his book, Callebaut explores the advantages of what is called the 'naturalistic turn' which is the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly.

Furthermore, the naturalistic turn is a move away from the a priori methods of traditional philosophy to a conception of philosophy as continuous with natural science.

However, I can't talk about my anti-reductionist turn unless I describe the road along which that turn has occurred.

This is where I have been.

BSc - Human Biology

PhD - Anatomy

MA - History of Philosophy

And then I came here.

I got the job here because they advertised for a human biologist - only to be told, when I arrived, that the term was only meant as a 'catch-all'.

They didn't really want what I had been trained to be - nor care about what I had to offer for that matter.

But be that as it may.

Although I had also worked in hospitals as a radiographer for some years and spent about as many years teaching medical and dental students, it was only when I got here that I settled on a primary research topic that had direct clinical relevance.

'My research is concerned with exploring the biological and philosophical aspects of the concepts of disease and health and considering the uses and applications of these findings.'

This came about largely because I was told (not asked) to teach a post-graduate module called 'The Biology of Degenerative Disease'.

I was, of course, keen to find out what 'degenerative disease' was and in trying to do this stumbled upon a debate that had raged, at that time for over 20 years, about the definition of disease in general - not to mention the definition of health.

Disease, according to the Richard Smith, editor of the BMJ, is a slippery concept - hard to pin down or give a simple definition.

Furthermore, it is not a concept to which clinicians - let alone anybody else - tend to give much careful thought.

What is more, they give, he suggests, even less to the concept of health.

Here the emphasis is on 'careful thought'.

I've frequently been met with incomprehension when I've described what I've been doing.

(Although, refreshingly, last year I did meet somebody who was clearly better informed (having been on 'The Moral Maze' a couple of nights before) and, although I'm sure she's an atheist, seemed to give thanks that there was somebody actually doing what I'm doing.)

Anybody who thinks they have a definition of disease or health just hasn't thought deeply enough about the matter.

What most people come up with is, what are called, 'essentialist definitions'.

An essentialist position holds that not all of an object's properties are of equal signification – that is, some are essential to its being what it is, whereas others are accidental. For example, one might argue that the possession of pages is an essential feature if we are to call something a book, whereas the precise colour of those pages is accidental. The main problem with an essentialist position is that of establishing the grounds upon which to base the distinctions one makes between essential and accidental features. It does not necessarily follow that what one 'knows' intuitively can be easily supported by a rational argument. There are always 'what ifs' with which to contend.

Popper, for example, held that essentialist definitions that depend upon intuitive acceptance for their validity can have no place in science.

The debate about the definitions of disease and health has been described as cacophonous, up a blind alley and down a cul-de-sac and although unresolved is still potentially valuable for what it throws up in the process.

It has shown how important areas in the philosophy of medicine are missing or under-developed.

'Historically, the focus of philosophical interest in medicine has been on its ethics, to the neglect of its logic, epistemology, and metaphysics. As a result, no philosophy of medicine exists comparable to the extant philosophies of science, law, religion, politics, history, or art.'

Edmund Pellegrino

Here, should add that I was later told that the module title 'Biology of Degenerative Disease' was just something that was thought up to distinguish it from Andy Lilley's 'Biology of Infectious Disease'.

Simply calling it the 'Biology of Non-Infectious Disease' might have caused confusion.

But be that as it may.

Importantly, I had discovered a really big problem.

I should add, that as part of my MA, I did a dissertation on Peter Medawar's philosophical thought and must say that I dislike very much his notion that research should be understood as the 'Art of the Soluble'.

At much the same time as I was doing the degenerative disease module, the first writings on Darwinian Medicine were also beginning to appear and I became associated with that field from quite early-on having produced a website to which numerous people throughout the world set up links.

'Darwinian medicine is the enterprise of trying to find evolutionary explanations for vulnerabilities to disease.'

Randolph Nesse

Nesse contends that since, according to Dobzhansky 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution', the same must also be true of medicine since biology is a basic science underpinning medicine.

Unfortunately, that site vanished without warning when the corporate website was revamped last year.

But be that as it may.

So, in fact, I've been working in two fields simultaneously: Evolutionary Medicine (as Darwinian Medicine now tends to be called) and the philosophical debate about disease and health.

In particular, I've been trying to find a way of bringing each to bear upon the other.

Not least because, in Evolutionary Medicine, old proto-scientific terms are still bandied about relying on intuition for their validity.

And furthermore, because we cannot come to definitions of disease and health by simply analysing word use (as some have tried to do) nor can we by considering what we might intuitively label as 'pathological'.

Another approach is needed.

In addition, there are wider and deeper questions to be asked.

What is it like to be exposed to selection pressures?

What forms do such pressures take in daily life?

How do we even begin to investigate questions such as these?

How we approach such questions is a significant question in itself.

Taking a lead from Lynn Margulis, I have deliberately tried to adopt what might be described as a more liberal approach.

'As taught in Nat Sci 2, science was a liberal art, a way of knowing. We were taught how, through science, we could go about answering important philosophical questions ...

There science facilitated the query of profound questions where philosophy and science merge ...'

Lynn Margulis

Strangely, it is physics that gets associated with the really big questions.

It seems to be physics that most often gets associated with the really questions about 'life, the universe and everything'.

Why?

While there may be some perks to studying physics …

… of the sciences, it is biology that may be best suited to the enterprise to which Margulis refers.

However,

it depends very much on the way in which it is undertaken.

It's not just a matter of worrying about words. What is needed is a philosophy of the object (à la Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995)).

One of the early intentions of biology when the term came into use a little over 200 years ago was to determine what life was.

The problem, as I see it, is that now biology is largely built upon intuitive notions the like of which were criticised earlier.

We study life and think we know what life is - but if asked, we are not able to give a satisfactory definition.

What is missing is what has been described as a 'philosophy of the (biological) object'.

This is where I think the solution to the problems with which I've been engaged is likely to lie - and where I think new interesting questions will also be found.

This notion/approach is associated with the medically trained French philosopher Georges Canguilhem.

Here, instead of breaking down the living object into smaller and smaller components and loosing the essence of what it is in-the-world (to use an expression from Heidegger), the intention is to preserve that essence and, indeed, determine what that essence is without recourse to intuition.

These smaller and smaller components, to which I refer, are not merely the object's physical, anatomical components but anything that might be deemed overly circumscribed or particularised.

It's not simple or straight-forward.

It's not easy; that's what makes it worthwhile.

It's not a matter of finding something soluble but something labyrinthine.

I must conclude by addressing the 'what I am currently doing' aspect of today.

What I've done in the last couple of weeks is follow some advice and plan out almost the entirety of my project.

This includes all the relevant bits I think need considering in order to explore the biological and philosophical aspects of the concepts of disease and health.

Things I have and continue to address.

It doesn't, however, include what I've looked into and decided doesn't apply, though.

I said earlier that I can't talk about my anti-reductionist turn unless I describe the road along which that turn occurred.

There is also a road ahead.

John Locke saw himself as an under-labourer clearing away the rubbish so that the task could be made easier for others.

I think it's not too bold to suggest that my work has an element of the Lockean about it because there's a load of rubbish about - earlier we considered intuitively held definitions, more than once.

There is a lot more rubbish than just that.

However, one must also remember what is perhaps David Hume's most famous realisation that there is no logical basis for expecting the sun to rise tomorrow.

It does not necessarily follow that the future will be like the past.

Thus, one cannot pre-empt what lies ahead but only allow the road to reveal itself as one travels along it.

To be a Locke

one must also learn from Hume