Aitiologies in the reality narratives of the natural sciences: On the epistemic function of origin (re)constructions

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Georg Toepfer
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; History of Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458735579

The project investigates the widespread aitiological procedures of the historical natural sciences, in which the present is understood and explained through the representation of historical trajectories, including the construction and reconstruction of significant starting points of developments. In particular, the project aims at analyzing the explanatory evolutionary narratives in the biological sciences with regard to their concepts, images, procedures and instrumentalizations as well as the epistemic functions and the fictional status of the supposed original structures. The analysis focuses particularly on the empirical accessibility of the postulated origins, their controlled fictional content, narrative involvement, and explanatory scope. In interaction with the other subprojects, the specificity of scientific aitiologies and their difference to cultural myths and ideologies will be determined. Finally, one of the aims of the subproject is to investigate the interplay between fictionality and factuality, construction and reconstruction, narration and explanation in the historical life sciences. The underlying hypothesis of the project is that the construction of an origin in the argumentations of the historical natural sciences has a similar function of ordering and unifying the manifold of appearances as the laws in the nomological natural sciences.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5323: Aetiologies: Founding Narratives in Literary, Scholarly, and Scientific Discourses