La teoría de radicales libres en el envejecimiento establece que los organismos envejecena causa de la acumulación de daño originado por radicales libres en el tiempo. Uno de losprincipales postulados de esta teoría es que los radicales libres están implicados como participantesdecisivos en reacciones biológicas de óxido-reducción. En este trabajo, partiendodesde el marco teórico de la concepción estructuralista de las teorías científicas, se intentaclarificar la relación entre la teoría de radicales libres y el modelo para reacciones de óxidoreducción.

Someone is “verballed” in the Anglo-Australian idiom if they have attributed to them statements they did not actually make and indeed have explicitly denied. We will examine the evidence that Kuhn and Feyerabend were verballed in this sense by their critics and that the role of the idea of incommensurability in their argumentation has been systematically misunderstood and -represented. In particular, we will see that neither Kuhn nor Feyerabend, despite what their critics often say about them, held that incommensurability of (...) theories implies the rational incomparability of theories. This is especially clear in the case of Feyerabend, whose argument is NOT that theories in a scientific tradition are on occasion incommensurable, but, rather, that, when the relations of theories in a tradition are represented in a particular way, they may on occasion be incommensurable according to that representation and hence incomparable if that representation is taken as providing the mechanisms of comparison. And the point of this claim is not to establish something about science, but, rather, to establish something about the representations of science which yield this result (i.e. that two theories might be incommensurable). Feyerabend in other words invokes incommensurability (according to the standards of a particular representation) as a reductio of that mode of representation. And this argument in fact depends precisely on the comparability of theories which are, according to the representation, incommensurable. Feyerabend’s argument is about the ways in which we should understand progress in science and he is concerned, in particular, to establish that a historically informed approach is superior to an approach which, if applicable, is applicable only to what he calls “abstract traditions”. Kuhn’s work, especially in the Postscript—1969, provides complementary materials, especially in relation to a collectivised and non-“algorithmic” account of theory choice across formally incommensurable paradigms. (shrink)

Several case studies and theoretical reports indicate that the structuralist concept of a constraint has a central role in the reconstruction of physical theories. It is surprising that there is, in the literature, only little theoretical discussion on the relevance of constraints for the reconstruction of social scientific theories. Almost all structuralist reconstructions of social theorizing are vacuously constrained. Consequently, constraints are methodologically irrelevant.In this paper I try to show that there really exist constraint-type assumptions in mathematical modelling in the (...) social sciences. Methodologically constraints have exactly the same role in the context of social mathematical modelling as they have in physical theories. In typical cases of mathematical modelling in the social sciences, the related constraints work as empirical hypotheses and should be tested by statistical means. (shrink)

Normal science involves persistent collective application of an agreed research agenda. Anomaly can threaten normal science, but so too can “undue persistence” in that agenda by a normal science peer group. We consider how “undue persistence” might be a collective effect of the common incentive structure that individual members of the peer group typically face in relation to their careers. To understand how “undue persistence” might be ameliorated, we consider the affordances of a peer’s membership of a departmental collegium, organized (...) on a different basis than the specialist peer group and hence able to supply the individual scholar with kinds of information and critical comment that may occasion off-agenda contributions to the specialty. The idea of brokerage is borrowed from the sociology of innovation to see how a scholar’s departmental colleagues might be able to broker new ways of thinking that can assist in the avoidance of “undue persistence”. (shrink)

This article presents a reconstruction of the so-called classical, formal or Mendelian genetics, which is intended to be more complete and adequate than existing reconstructions. This reconstruction has been carried out with the instruments, duly modified and extended with respect to the case under consideration, of the structuralist conception of theories. The so-called Mendel’s Laws, as well as linkage genetics and gene mapping are formulated in a precise manner while the global structure of genetics is represented as a theory-net. These (...) results are of methodological, philosophical and didactical relevance. (shrink)

The Three Papers comprising this series, together with my earlier [34] also published in this journal, constitute an attempt to set out the major issues in the theoretical domain of reduction and to develop a general theory of theory reduction. The fourth paper, [34], though published separately from this trio, is integral to the presentation and should be read in conjunction with these papers. Even so, the presentation is limited in scope – roughly, to intertheoretic reduction among empirical theories – (...) and informal in presentation – not least because a satisfying formal account of theories has yet to be offered. And despite the length, the treatment is still condensed; often corroborating and/or intuitively helpful detail has had to be consigned to footnotes or omitted. I approach the problem from within my own naturalistic realist philosophy of science and formal analysis of abstract hierarchy in theory. The sources for the former are [25], [29], [31], and [32] and those for the latter essentially [27] and [30]. Hierarchical notions played a significant role in the already published [34]. (shrink)