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WIMSATT, William C. Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings. Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. xvi + 450 pp. Cloth, $ 49.95- The book contains essays written by William C. Wimsatt since 1971. The essays discuss how scientific method must be constructed to account for complex systems such as they are found in biology, engineering, society, and culture. Wimsatt builds his theories on the work of Herbert Simon, Donald Campbell, Richard Lewontin, and Richard Levins. He argues that we are "limited beings in a rich, messy world" (p. 5) and that we must build our knowledge on heuristics. This does not entail relativism. Rather, it leads to acknowledging the biases of scientific approaches. Through this awareness, an explanation of complexity becomes possible. Wimsatt exemplifies this by concepts that are used in biology namely, "robustness, heuristic strategies, near-decomposability, levels of organization, mechanistic explanation and generative entrenchment" (p. ix).
Part I of the book explains the need for heuristics as scientific method. Part II provides for heuristic principles, and Part III shows how the application of those principles on complex issues provides for more suitable results than simple reductionism. Part IV discusses an engineering example that...