TITLE:
A Study of the Structure of Evolutionary Theory
AUTHORS:
Wei Wei
KEYWORDS:
Evolutionary Theory, Modern Synthesis Evolutionary Theory, Syntactic View, Semantic View, Hypothesis-Deductive, Axiomatization
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.6,
June
20,
2024
ABSTRACT: The scientific status of evolutionary theory has always been one of the focus issues of philosophy of science, and also the primary issue of philosophy of biology. At present, there are two main types of discussion about the structure of evolutionary theory. One is the traditional hypothesis-deductive approach, and the other is the semantic approach relative to the syntactic approach. This paper will discuss three representative schemes, the first one is Williams, the second one is Ruse, and the third is the semantic view. Through the investigation and analysis of these three schemes which make up the two approaches, this paper will point out that both of these approaches have obvious advantages in explaining the structure of evolution, but it will be pointed out in this paper that neither of them can fully explain the structure of evolutionary theory, and a comprehensive approach should be proposed. That is, it can be defended by a semantic view of the theoretical model, and in each concrete sub-theory, deductive construction is carried out.