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  1. On the Possibility of Crucial Experiments in Biology.Tudor Baetu - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (2):407-429.
    The article analyses in detail the Meselson–Stahl experiment, identifying two novel difficulties for the crucial experiment account, namely, the fragility of the experimental results and the fact that the hypotheses under scrutiny were not mutually exclusive. The crucial experiment account is rejected in favour of an experimental-mechanistic account of the historical significance of the experiment, emphasizing that the experiment generated data about the biochemistry of DNA replication that is independent of the testing of the semi-conservative, conservative, and dispersive hypotheses. _1_ (...)
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  • Expanding the notion of mechanism to further understanding of biopsychosocial disorders? Depression and medically-unexplained pain as cases in point.Jan Pieter Konsman - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 103 (C):123-136.
    Evidence-Based Medicine has little consideration for mechanisms and philosophers of science and medicine have recently made pleas to increase the place of mechanisms in the medical evidence hierarchy. However, in this debate the notions of mechanisms seem to be limited to 'mechanistic processes' and 'complex-systems mechanisms,' understood as 'componential causal systems'. I believe that this will not do full justice to how mechanisms are used in biological, psychological and social sciences and, consequently, in a more biopsychosocial approach to medicine. Here, (...)
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  • How and when are topological explanations complete mechanistic explanations? The case of multilayer network models.Beate Krickel, Leon de Bruin & Linda Douw - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-21.
    The relationship between topological explanation and mechanistic explanation is unclear. Most philosophers agree that at least some topological explanations are mechanistic explanations. The crucial question is how to make sense of this claim. Zednik (Philos Psychol 32(1):23–51, 2019) argues that topological explanations are mechanistic if they (i) describe mechanism sketches that (ii) pick out organizational properties of mechanisms. While we agree with Zednik’s conclusion, we critically discuss Zednik’s account and show that it fails as a general account of how and (...)
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  • A mechanistic guide to reductive physicalism.Tudor M. Baetu - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (4):1-21.
    Causal mediation mechanisms are well supported by available experimental evidence and provide a practicable way to reductive physicalism. According to the causal mediation account of mechanistic explanation, descriptions as diverse as ‘black-box’ phenomena, mechanistic sketches and schemas mixing physically interpreted and operationalized biological, psychological and social variables, and detailed descriptions of mechanisms refer to the same causal structure circumscribed within the spatiotemporal boundaries of a replicable experimental setup. The coreference of coarser- and finer-grained descriptions of causal structures opens new possibilities (...)
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  • The Completeness of Mechanistic Explanations.Tudor M. Baetu - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):775-786.
    The paper discusses methodological guidelines for evaluating mechanistic explanations. According to current accounts, a satisfactory mechanistic explanation should include all of the relevant features of the mechanism, its component entities and activities, and their properties and organization, as well as exhibit productive continuity. It is not specified, however, how this kind of mechanistic completeness can be demonstrated. I argue that parameter sufficiency inferences based on mathematical model simulations provide a way of determining whether a mechanism capable of producing the phenomenon (...)
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  • From interventions to mechanistic explanations.Tudor M. Baetu - 2016 - Synthese 193 (10).
    An important strategy in the discovery of biological mechanisms involves the piecing together of experimental results from interventions. However, if mechanisms are investigated by means of ideal interventions, as defined by James Woodward and others, then the kind of information revealed is insufficient to discriminate between modular and non-modular causal contributions. Ideal interventions suffice for constructing webs of causal dependencies that can be used to make some predictions about experimental outcomes, but tell us little about how causally relevant factors are (...)
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  • Explanation in Biology: An Enquiry into the Diversity of Explanatory Patterns in the Life Sciences.P.-A. Braillard and C. Malaterre (ed.) - 2015 - Springer.
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  • (1 other version)On pain experience, multidisciplinary integration and the level-laden conception of science.Tudor Baetu - 2017 - Synthese:1-20.
    Multidisciplinary models aggregating ‘lower-level’ biological and ‘higher-level’ psychological and social determinants of a phenomenon raise a puzzle. How is the interaction between the physical, the psychological and the social conceptualized and explained? Using biopsychosocial models of pain as an illustration, I argue that these models are in fact level-neutral compilations of empirical findings about correlated and causally relevant factors, and as such they neither assume, nor entail a conceptual or ontological stratification into levels of description, explanation or reality. If inter-level (...)
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  • The ‘Big Picture’: The Problem of Extrapolation in Basic Research.Tudor M. Baetu - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (4):941-964.
    Both clinical research and basic science rely on the epistemic practice of extrapolation from surrogate models, to the point that explanatory accounts presented in review papers and biology textbooks are in fact composite pictures reconstituted from data gathered in a variety of distinct experimental setups. This raises two new challenges to previously proposed mechanistic-similarity solutions to the problem of extrapolation: one pertaining to the absence of mechanistic knowledge in the early stages of research and the second to the large number (...)
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  • (1 other version)Models and the mosaic of scientific knowledge. The case of immunology.Tudor M. Baetu - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (1):49-56.
    A survey of models in immunology is conducted and distinct kinds of models are characterized based on whether models are material or conceptual, the distinctiveness of their epistemic purpose, and the criteria for evaluating the goodness of a model relative to its intended purpose. I argue that the diversity of models in interdisciplinary fields such as immunology reflects the fact that information about the phenomena of interest is gathered from different sources using multiple methods of investigation. To each model is (...)
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  • Against Harmony: Infinite Idealizations and Causal Explanation.Iulian D. Toader - 2015 - In Ilie Parvu, Gabriel Sandu & Iulian D. Toader (eds.), Romanian Studies in Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 313: Springer. pp. 291-301.
    This paper argues against the view that the standard explanation of phase transitions in statistical mechanics may be considered a causal explanation, a distortion that can nevertheless successfully represent causal relations.
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  • When Is a Mechanistic Explanation Satisfactory? Reductionism and Antireductionism in the Context of Mechanistic Explanations.Tudor Băetu - 2015 - In Alexandru Manafu (ed.), The Prospects for Fusion Emergence. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 313: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 313.
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  • Chance, Experimental Reproducibility, and Mechanistic Regularity.Tudor M. Baetu - 2013 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27 (3):253-271.
    Examples from the sciences showing that mechanisms do not always succeed in producing the phenomena for which they are responsible have led some authors to conclude that the regularity requirement can be eliminated from characterizations of mechanisms. In this article, I challenge this conclusion and argue that a minimal form of regularity is inextricably embedded in examples of elucidated mechanisms that have been shown to be causally responsible for phenomena. Examples of mechanistic explanations from the sciences involve mechanisms that have (...)
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