Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2018 number 4

The article discusses the functioning of the concepts “entropy” and “self-organization” during the development of conceptual basis of biophysics. Relying on the distinction between “cutting edge science”, “journal science” and “textbook science” (L. Fleck), we consider the development of theoretical foundations in the textbooks on biophysics by B.N. Tarusov, M.V. Volkenshtein and A.B. Rubin. The functioning of basic concepts is examined on the base of A.I. Lipkin’s conception of primary and secondary ideal objects, and the distinction between levels of meaning of concepts is made building on V.S. Stepin’s ideas, which allows correlating the levels of declaration and model implementation. Both textbooks produce no strict theoretical system. Volkenshtein’s textbook is of more “model” character. It reproduces Schrodinger’s theoretical scheme which performs certain functions of a paradigm (T. Kuhn) and may be termed as protoparadigmatic. Here, the concept of entropy is central, it is introduced at the mathematical level and applied at the physical and biological levels owing to its natural philosophy sense. In Rubin's textbook, there is an obvious tendency to a larger theorization, biophysical models are based on the concept of self-organization, the notion of entropy is used in a limited way, and the scheme of Prigogine’s school of nonequilibrium thermodynamics becomes main. The difference between conceptual structures of these textbooks may be considered as a change of protoparadigmatic theoretical schemes and their ontologies. The fact that the textbooks on biophysics differ, are theoretically inconsistent and problematic tells that there is no fundamental biophysical theory. The desire to create it is concerned with scientists’ common “dream of a unified theory”.