Lisa Gannett (Saint Mary's University), A Local Epistemology of Group Categories in Population Genomics

 

  

Monday, April 22, 18 PM

Gilman building, Hall 449

  

Chair: Yossef Schwartz

 

Philosophers of science have traditionally taken scientists to be engaged in the pursuit of global and comprehensive truths, not local and partial ones. Scientific categories are expected to ‘cut nature at its joints’; scientific laws are expected to hold throughout this—and, even, any possible—universe; scientific theories are expected to be progressively subsumed within a single, unified structure. Newton is the hero of this tradition. Over recent decades, however, a decidedly anti-Newtonian theoretical pluralism has become a respectable position, whether defended for metaphysical (e.g., Cartwright 1999, Dupré 1995) or epistemological (e.g., Longino 2002) reasons. In this paper, I argue that researchers in population genetics and genomics should embrace a local epistemology of group categories that forgoes global explanatory ends. On metaphysical grounds, the evolutionary contingency thesis (Beatty 1995) promotes recognition of the spatial and temporal contingency of patterns of human genome diversity; the spatio-temporally localized projectibility of group-based predicates that results is due also to the contingency of the sociohistorical construction of the group categories. On epistemological grounds, the diversity of interests and purposes of researchers is recognized to support not only the development of regulative standards specific to ‘cognitive communities’ (per Longino’s ‘local epistemology’) but the need for a more pragmatic epistemological framework and broader conception of local epistemology.