Depends what type of research. If you’re doing experimental cell biology, it’s less likely that your research will be ruined by abstract philosophical assumptions which can’t be overcome by looking at the data.
Philosophic assumptions about what it means for a gene to have a given function aren’t trivial. It’s quite easy to fall victim to think about genes as platonic concepts that have an inherent function in a way that macro-phenomena don’t have in our world.
If you are dealing with complex system it’s quite easy to get mislead by bad philosophic assumptions.
In bioinformatics philosophers like Barry Smith made very important contributions to think better about ontology.
Apart from ontology epistomology is also hard. A lot of experimental cell biology papers don’t replicate. Thinking well about epistomology would allow the field to reduce the amount of papers that draw wrong conclusion from the data.
Distinguishing correlation from causation requires reasoning about the underlying reality and it’s easy to get wrong.
That actually seems false to me. My current model is that cell biology is more bottlenecked on good philosophical assumptions than empirical data. Just flagging disagreement, not necessary to hash this out.
Depends what type of research. If you’re doing experimental cell biology, it’s less likely that your research will be ruined by abstract philosophical assumptions which can’t be overcome by looking at the data.
Philosophic assumptions about what it means for a gene to have a given function aren’t trivial. It’s quite easy to fall victim to think about genes as platonic concepts that have an inherent function in a way that macro-phenomena don’t have in our world.
If you are dealing with complex system it’s quite easy to get mislead by bad philosophic assumptions.
In bioinformatics philosophers like Barry Smith made very important contributions to think better about ontology.
Apart from ontology epistomology is also hard. A lot of experimental cell biology papers don’t replicate. Thinking well about epistomology would allow the field to reduce the amount of papers that draw wrong conclusion from the data.
Distinguishing correlation from causation requires reasoning about the underlying reality and it’s easy to get wrong.
That actually seems false to me. My current model is that cell biology is more bottlenecked on good philosophical assumptions than empirical data. Just flagging disagreement, not necessary to hash this out.