Joseph Rouse (Wesleyan University) - Work on repertoires in the life sciences (e.g., Ankeny and Leonelli 2016) has primarily emphasized the expansion of traditional philosophical concern with theory and concepts, by attending to the material and social environments of research. I complement this work by considering how some familiar topics look different in the context of work on scientific practices and repertoires, and thus show that attention to repertoires is philosophically transformative as well as expansive. I consider three familiar concerns transformed by recognition of the conceptual significance of repertoires in developing scientific understanding. The first concerns philosophical emphasis upon the growth of scientific knowledge. Epistemic growth is traditionally understood as the replacement of ignorance or error by empirically justified claims. Attention to material and social repertoires highlights a more basic expansion and reconfiguration of the Sellarsian “space of reasons.” New experimental systems and research methods, and the scientific communities whose skill-development and research priorities deploy them, make it possible to explore aspects of the world that were previously inaccessible to scientific understanding, and to formulate and assess claims about such phenomena. Recognizing the role of repertoires in conceptual expansion also shifts familiar concern with the empirical meaning of scientific concepts toward their material exemplification (Elgin 2009). I use examples from the history of the gene concept to show how conceptual shifts in and reorientations of genetics as a discipline were guided by changes to the experimental systems and methods through which researchers established conceptually significant differences in genetic transmission, expression, regulation, and organization. Attention to repertoires also encourages re-conceiving familiar questions about the character and scope of laws and alethic modalities. Philosophers have usually started with a conception of laws and lawfulness drawn from the physical sciences to ask whether laws so conceived can be discerned in other sciences. Attention to repertoires conjoins and extends work by Haugeland (1998a, b) and Lange (2007) that instead attends to the role lawful invariance plays in domain-constitutive patterns of scientific reasoning. The counterfactual range of that invariance, the skills, methods and standards that determine whether invariance is maintained, and the issues and stakes with respect to which that invariance matters, are integral to the establishment and maintenance of a repertoire.
