It is widely believed that empiricism, though once dominant, is now extinct. This turns out to be mistaken because of incorrect assumption about the initial dominance of logical empiricism and about the content and variety of logical empiricist views. In fact, prominent contemporary philosophers (Quine and Kuhn) who are thought to have demolished logical empiricism are shown to exhibit central views of the logical empiricists rather than having overthrown them.

This paper proposes a methodology to investigate how the conceptual structure of a model may have borrowed from an already existing model in a different field. From a reverse perspective, it amounts to hypothesizing that an already existing model was somehow transferred to a new field and incorporated into a newly constructed model with the purpose of explaining some additional phenomena. We use two well-known theoretic models, Robert Malthus’ model of human population and Darwin’s model of organism population included in (...) the theory of evolution by natural selection, to exemplify this “incorporation of a conceptual structure” methodology. By highlighting how the conceptual structure of Malthus’ model actually sits within that of Darwin’s model, we show how Darwin’s model may have been constructed, on the one hand, and how Malthus’ model may have been transferred, on the other hand. In order to show how the construction and transfer occur, we outline five epistemic strategies that could be underlying incorporation. Overall, this methodology can be viewed as a diadic and bijective perspective on models that can be applied to other similar cases, using “construction” and “transfer” as complementary handles to probe the available conceptual, structural, and historiographical material. (shrink)