Joseph Henry Woodger
Joseph Henry Woodger (2 May 1894 – 8 March 1981) was a British
Life and work
Joseph Woodger was born at
Family
Woodger was known to friends and family as "Socrates", and with his wife Eden (born Buckle) he lived at Epsom in Surrey, where they had four children. His eldest child was Mike Woodger (born 1923), a computer pioneer who worked with Alan Turing at the National Physical Laboratory, leading to the early Pilot ACE computer.[6] He died in 1981.[1]
On scientific method
Woodger led the introduction of positivist philosophy of science into biology with his 1929 book Biological Principles,[7] for which he has been roundly if unfairly criticised.[8] He saw a mature science as being characterised by a framework of hypotheses which could be verified by facts established by experiments. He criticised the traditional natural history style of biology, including the study of evolution, as immature science, since it relied on narrative.[7]
For example, he wrote "Admittedly, some hypotheses have become so well established that no one doubts them. But this does not mean that they are known to be true. We cannot determine the truth of a hypothesis by counting the number of people who believe it, and a hypothesis does not cease to be a hypothesis when a lot of people believe it."[9]
Woodger set out to play for biology the role of
Bibliography
- Elementary Morphology and Physiology for Medical Students: A Guide for the First Year and A Stepping Stone to the Second (1924). London: Humphrey-Milford.
- Biological Principles (1929). London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner.
- The Axiomatic Method in Biology (1937). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.[10]
- The Technique of Theory Construction (1939), Chicago.
- Biology and Language (1952). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
References
- ^ .
- ^ Bowler, Peter J. (2001). Reconciling science and religion: the debate in early-twentieth-century Britain.
- ^ Morange, Michel Morange; Cobb, Matthew (2000). A history of molecular biology. p. 91.
- ^ Cambridge scientific minds, Peter Michael Harman, Simon Mitton, 2002, p. 302
- ^ Lawrence, Christopher; Weisz, George (1998). Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine, 1920–1950. Oxford University Press. p. 12.
- ^ Yates, David (Spring 2010). "Pioneer Profile: Michael Woodger". Computer Resurrection – the Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society. 50.
- ^ )
- S2CID 254542349.
- ^ Woodger, J. H. (1948). "Observations on the present state of embryology". Symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology. 2 (Growth in Relation to Differentiation and Morphogenesis): 354.
- .