For context, we must go back to the early twentieth century and the way science was often presented. A view known as Positivism held that science was about objective factual activities that, while they didn’t span the gap between Kant’s noumena and phenomena, nevertheless was the best we could get, and the science in question was physics.[1] As Rutherford repeatedly stated, “In science there is only physics. All else is stamp collecting.” This raised more than a few hackles among social scientists and biologists, including the famous ornithologist and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who in his later years turned to philosophy and history of biology. Having stated that when he turned to philosophy to aid his scientific work,
[a]fter switching my studies from medicine to zoology (particularly birds) following the completion of my preclinical examinations, I took courses in philosophy at the University of Berlin. But to my disappointment, they built no bridges between the subject matter of the biological sciences and that of philosophy. Yet in the 1920s and 30s a discipline was developing that would eventually be designated "philosophy of science." In the 1950s, when I became acquainted with the teachings of this field, I was again bitterly disappointed. This was no philosophy of science; this was a philosophy of logic, mathematics, and the physical sciences. It had almost nothing to do with the concerns of biologists. [1997, xiv–xv]
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