caa a22 4500 465803024 CHVBK 20180323112057.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170327e19900701xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/BF00165255 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/BF00165255 Vicedo Marga Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 600 North Park Street, 53706, Madison, WI, U.S.A. aut T.H. Morgan, neither an epistemological empiricist nor a "Methodological” empiricist [Elektronische Daten] [Marga Vicedo] T. H. Morgan (1866-1945), the founder of the Drosophila research group in genetics that established the chromosome theory of Mendelian inheritance, has been described as a radical empiricist in the historical literature. His empiricism, furthermore, is supposed to have prejudiced him against certain scientific conclusions. This paper aims to show two things: first, that the sense in which the term "empiricism” has been used by scholars is too weak to be illuminating. It is necessary to distinguish between empiricism as an epistemological position and the so-called "methodological” empiricism. I will argue that the way the latter has been presented cannot distinguish an empiricist methodology from a non-empiricist one. Second, I will show that T. H. Morgan was not an epistemological empiricist as this term is usually defined in philosophy. The reason is that he believed in the existence of genes as material entities when they were unobservable entities when they were unobservable entities introduced to account for the phenotypic ratios found in breeding experiments. These two points, of course, are interrelated. If we were to water down the meaning of empiricis, perhaps we could call Morgan an empiricist. But then we would also fail to distinguish empiricism from realism. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990 Epistemological empiricism nationallicence methodological empiricism nationallicence realism nationallicence genes nationallicence T. H. Morgan nationallicence Biology and Philosophy Kluwer Academic Publishers 5/3(1990-07-01), 293-311 0169-3867 5:3<293 1990 5 10539 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00165255 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00165255 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Vicedo Marga Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 600 North Park Street, 53706, Madison, WI, U.S.A aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Biology and Philosophy Kluwer Academic Publishers 5/3(1990-07-01), 293-311 0169-3867 5:3<293 1990 5 10539 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer