Bas van Fraassen y la Ley de Hardy-Weinberg: Una Discussión y Desarrollo de su Diagnóstico

• Main Author: Pablo Lorenzano
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2008-12-01
• Series: Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology
• Subjects: Van Fraassen; Hardy-Weinberg law; classical population genetics; structuralist view of theories; fundamental law; specialization
• Online Access: http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/article/view/16012/14514

The aim of this article is to discuss and develop the diagnose of the Hardy- Weinberg law made by van Fraassen (1987, p. 110), according to which: 1) that law cannot be considered a law used as an axiom for the classical population genetics as a whole, since it is an equilibrium-law that holds only under certain special conditions; 2) it just determines a subclass of models; 3) its generalization shades off into logical vacuity; and 4) more complex variants of the law can be deduced for more realistic assumptions. The discussion and development of such a diagnose will be carried out with the notions of another semantic conceptions of theories, related to that of van Fraassen, namely, the structuralist view of theories, and a rational reconstruction of classical population genetics made within the framework of such a metatheory, also presented in this paper.