Lessons from the History of Science

Abstract

This chapter provides four historical illustrations of black boxes. The first two originate from two intellectual giants in the field of biology. Darwin acknowledged the existence and significance of the mechanisms of inheritance. But he had no adequate proposal to offer. How could his explanations work so well, given that a crucial piece of the puzzle was missing? A similar shadow is cast on the work of Mendel and his early-twentieth-century followers, the so-called classical geneticists, who posited genes having little to no evidence of the nature, structure, or even the physical reality of these theoretical constructs. Another illustration is found in the elimination of mental states from the stimulus-response models advanced by psychological behaviorism. A final example comes from neoclassical economics, whose “as if” approach presupposes that the brain can be treated as a black box, essentially setting neuropsychological realism aside. The history of science, the chapter concludes, is essentially a history of black boxes.