Diferentes nociones de contexto: algunos casos desde la biología sintética

David Bordonaba-Plou; Esteban Céspedes

doi:10.5007/1808-1711.2025.e97820

Authors

David Bordonaba-Plou Universidad Complutense de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0788-9733
Esteban Céspedes Catholic University of the Maule https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5329-5434

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2025.e97820

Keywords:

Context, Synthetic Biology, Corpus Methods, Analysis, Synthesis

Abstract

The notion of context has been central to many debates and theories in recent decades. It is well-defined in some disciplines, such as linguistics or philosophy of language. However, there are other disciplines, for example, within the empirical sciences, where this is not always the case. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to test whether the different notions of context in the philosophy of language can be applied to the field of synthetic biology in order to gain more clarity in the latter area. In this way, besides contributing to a general characterization of the idea of context that allows a conceptual understanding of contexts, it will also be possible to study their role in scientific and technological research. Second, and to illustrate the fruitfulness of this intersection between disciplines, we show–through the use of corpus methods—how the application of the notion of context from the philosophy of language allows us to shed light on some of the central concepts in synthetic biology, namely, the distinction between synthesis and analysis. On this basis, our perspective will enable us to revisit the relationship between the philosophy of language and the philosophy of biology.

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