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  1. (1 other version)Bayesian Cognitive Science, Unification, and Explanation.Stephan Hartmann & Matteo Colombo - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2).
    It is often claimed that the greatest value of the Bayesian framework in cognitive science consists in its unifying power. Several Bayesian cognitive scientists assume that unification is obviously linked to explanatory power. But this link is not obvious, as unification in science is a heterogeneous notion, which may have little to do with explanation. While a crucial feature of most adequate explanations in cognitive science is that they reveal aspects of the causal mechanism that produces the phenomenon to be (...)
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  • Reconciling Ontic and Epistemic Constraints on Mechanistic Explanation, Epistemically.Dingmar van Eck - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (1):5-22.
    In this paper I address the current debate on ontic versus epistemic conceptualizations of mechanistic explanation in the mechanisms literature. Illari recently argued that good explanations are subject to both ontic and epistemic constraints: they must describe mechanisms in the world in such fashion that they provide understanding of their workings. Elaborating upon Illari’s ‘integration’ account, I argue that causal role function discovery of mechanisms and their components is an epistemic prerequisite for achieving these two aims. This analysis extends Illari’s (...)
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  • Natural Kindness.Matthew H. Slater - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (2):375-411.
    Philosophers have long been interested in a series of interrelated questions about natural kinds. What are they? What role do they play in science and metaphysics? How do they contribute to our epistemic projects? What categories count as natural kinds? And so on. Owing, perhaps, to different starting points and emphases, we now have at hand a variety of conceptions of natural kinds—some apparently better suited than others to accommodate a particular sort of inquiry. Even if coherent, this situation isn’t (...)
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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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  • Biological Explanation.Angela Potochnik - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 49-65.
    One of the central aims of science is explanation: scientists seek to uncover why things happen the way they do. This chapter addresses what kinds of explanations are formulated in biology, how explanatory aims influence other features of the field of biology, and the implications of all of this for biology education. Philosophical treatments of scientific explanation have been both complicated and enriched by attention to explanatory strategies in biology. Most basically, whereas traditional philosophy of science based explanation on derivation (...)
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  • Cancer, Conflict, and the Development of Nuclear Transplantation Techniques.Nathan Crowe - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (1):63-105.
    The technique of nuclear transplantation – popularly known as cloning – has been integrated into several different histories of twentieth century biology. Historians and science scholars have situated nuclear transplantation within narratives of scientific practice, biotechnology, bioethics, biomedicine, and changing views of life. However, nuclear transplantation has never been the focus of analysis. In this article, I examine the development of nuclear transplantation techniques, focusing on the people, motivations, and institutions associated with the first successful nuclear transfer in metazoans in (...)
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  • Cell Types as Natural Kinds.Matthew H. Slater - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (2):170-179.
    Talk of different types of cells is commonplace in the biological sciences. We know a great deal, for example, about human muscle cells by studying the same type of cells in mice. Information about cell type is apparently largely projectible across species boundaries. But what defines cell type? Do cells come pre-packaged into different natural kinds? Philosophical attention to these questions has been extremely limited [see e.g., Wilson (Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, pp 187–207, 1999; Genes and the Agents of Life, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Cancer and the Goals of Integration.Anya Plutynski - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (4):466-476.
    Cancer is not one, but many diseases, and each is a product of a variety of causes acting (and interacting) at distinct temporal and spatial scales, or “levels” in the biological hierarchy. In part because of this diversity of cancer types and causes, there has been a diversity of models, hypotheses, and explanations of carcinogenesis. However, there is one model of carcinogenesis that seems to have survived the diversification of cancer types: the multi-stage model of carcinogenesis. This paper examines the (...)
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  • Causal inference, mechanisms, and the Semmelweis case.Raphael Scholl - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (1):66-76.
    Semmelweis’s discovery of the cause of puerperal fever around the middle of the 19th century counts among the paradigm cases of scientific discovery. For several decades, philosophers of science have used the episode to illustrate, appraise and compare views of proper scientific methodology.Here I argue that the episode can be profitably reexamined in light of two cognate notions: causal reasoning and mechanisms. Semmelweis used several causal reasoning strategies both to support his own and to reject competing hypotheses. However, these strategies (...)
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  • Three kinds of new mechanism.Arnon Levy - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (1):99-114.
    I distinguish three theses associated with the new mechanistic philosophy – concerning causation, explanation and scientific methodology. Advocates of each thesis are identified and relationships among them are outlined. I then look at some recent work on natural selection and mechanisms. There, attention to different kinds of New Mechanism significantly affects of what is at stake.
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  • Reassessing Discovery: Rosalind Franklin, Scientific Visualization, and the Structure of DNA.Michelle G. Gibbons - 2012 - Philosophy of Science 79 (1):63-80.
    Philosophers have traditionally conceived of discovery in terms of internal cognitive acts. Close consideration of Rosalind Franklin's role in the discovery of the DNA double helix, however, reveals some problems with this traditional conception. This article argues that defining discovery in terms of mental operations entails problematic conclusions and excludes acts that should fall within the domain of discovery. It proposes that discovery be expanded to include external acts of making visible. Doing so allows for a reevaluation of Franklin's role (...)
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  • Autonomy in evolution: from minimal to complex life.Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo & Alvaro Moreno - 2012 - Synthese 185 (1):21-52.
    Our aim in the present paper is to approach the nature of life from the perspective of autonomy, showing that this perspective can be helpful for overcoming the traditional Cartesian gap between the physical and cognitive domains. We first argue that, although the phenomenon of life manifests itself as highly complex and multidimensional, requiring various levels of description, individual organisms constitute the core of this multifarious phenomenology. Thereafter, our discussion focuses on the nature of the organization of individual living entities, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Special Issue: Philosophical Considerations in the Teaching of Biology. Part I, Philosophy of Biology and Biological Explanation.Kostas Kampourakis (ed.) - 2013 - Springer (Science & Education).
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  • The emergence of group cognition.Georg Theiner & Tim O'Connor - 2010 - In Antonella Corradini & Timothy O'Connor (eds.), Emergence in science and philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 6--78.
    What drives much of the current philosophical interest in the idea of group cognition is its appeal to the manifestation of psychological properties—understood broadly to include states, processes, and dispositions—that are in some important yet elusive sense emergent with respect to the minds of individual group members. Our goal in this paper is to address a set of related, conditional questions: If human mentality is real yet emergent in a modest metaphysical sense only, then: (i) What would it mean for (...)
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  • Explanation in Biology: Reduction, Pluralism, and Explanatory Aims.Ingo Brigandt - 2011 - Science & Education 22 (1):69-91.
    This essay analyzes and develops recent views about explanation in biology. Philosophers of biology have parted with the received deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation primarily by attempting to capture actual biological theorizing and practice. This includes an endorsement of different kinds of explanation (e.g., mathematical and causal-mechanistic), a joint study of discovery and explanation, and an abandonment of models of theory reduction in favor of accounts of explanatory reduction. Of particular current interest are philosophical accounts of complex explanations that appeal (...)
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  • Philosophy 
of 
the 
Cognitive 
Sciences.William Bechtel & Mitchell Herschbach - 2010-01-04 - In Fritz Allhoff (ed.), Philosophies of the Sciences. Wiley‐Blackwell. pp. 239--261.
    Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary research endeavor focusing on human cognitive phenomena such as memory, language use, and reasoning. It emerged in the second half of the 20th century and is charting new directions at the beginning of the 21st century. This chapter begins by identifying the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science and reviewing the history of the interdisciplinary engagements that characterize it. The second section examines the role that mechanistic explanation plays in cognitive science, while the third focuses (...)
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  • Two concepts of mechanism: Componential causal system and abstract form of interaction.Jaakko Kuorikoski - 2009 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (2):143 – 160.
    Although there has been much recent discussion on mechanisms in philosophy of science and social theory, no shared understanding of the crucial concept itself has emerged. In this paper, a distinction between two core concepts of mechanism is made on the basis that the concepts correspond to two different research strategies: the concept of mechanism as a componential causal system is associated with the heuristic of functional decomposition and spatial localization and the concept of mechanism as an abstract form of (...)
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  • Schaffner’s Model of Theory Reduction: Critique and Reconstruction.Rasmus Gr⊘Nfeldt Winther - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (2):119-142.
    Schaffner’s model of theory reduction has played an important role in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. Here, the model is found to be problematic because of an internal tension. Indeed, standard antireductionist external criticisms concerning reduction functions and laws in biology do not provide a full picture of the limits of Schaffner’s model. However, despite the internal tension, his model usefully highlights the importance of regulative ideals associated with the search for derivational, and embedding, deductive relations among mathematical (...)
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  • Dynamic mechanistic explanation: computational modeling of circadian rhythms as an exemplar for cognitive science.William Bechtel & Adele Abrahamsen - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (3):321-333.
    Two widely accepted assumptions within cognitive science are that (1) the goal is to understand the mechanisms responsible for cognitive performances and (2) computational modeling is a major tool for understanding these mechanisms. The particular approaches to computational modeling adopted in cognitive science, moreover, have significantly affected the way in which cognitive mechanisms are understood. Unable to employ some of the more common methods for conducting research on mechanisms, cognitive scientists’ guiding ideas about mechanism have developed in conjunction with their (...)
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  • (1 other version)How to fix kind membership: A problem for hpc theory and a solution.Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (5):724-736.
    Natural kinds are often contrasted with other kinds of scientific kinds, especially functional kinds, because of a presumed categorical difference in explanatory value: supposedly, natural kinds can ground explanations, while other kinds of kinds cannot. I argue against this view of natural kinds by examining a particular type of explanation—mechanistic explanation—and showing that functional kinds do the same work there as traditionally recognized natural kinds are supposed to do in “standard” scientific explanations. Breaking down this categorical distinction between traditional natural (...)
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  • Mechanisms in cognitive psychology: What are the operations?William Bechtel - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (5):983-994.
    Cognitive psychologists, like biologists, frequently describe mechanisms when explaining phenomena. Unlike biologists, who can often trace material transformations to identify operations, psychologists face a more daunting task in identifying operations that transform information. Behavior provides little guidance as to the nature of the operations involved. While not itself revealing the operations, identification of brain areas involved in psychological mechanisms can help constrain attempts to characterize the operations. In current memory research, evidence that the same brain areas are involved in what (...)
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  • (1 other version)Mechanisms and psychological explanation.Cory Wright & William Bechtel - 2006 - In Paul Thagard (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science. Elsevier.
    As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning about mechanisms. We discuss the manner in which mechanistic approaches serve to bridge levels rather than (...)
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  • Explanation: Mechanism, modularity, and situated cognition.William Bechtel - 2008 - In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 155--170.
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  • Constraint-based reasoning in cell biology: on the explanatory role of context.Karl S. Matlin & Sara Green - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (3):1-26.
    Cell biologists, including those seeking molecular mechanistic explanations of cellular phenomena, frequently rely on experimental strategies focused on identifying the cellular context relevant to their investigations. We suggest that such practices can be understood as a guided decomposition strategy, where molecular explanations of phenomena are defined in relation to natural contextual (cell) boundaries. This “top-down” strategy contrasts with “bottom-up” reductionist approaches where well-defined molecular structures and activities are orphaned by their displacement from actual biological functions. We focus on the central (...)
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  • Minding the gap: discovering the phenomenon of chemical transmission in the nervous system.William Bechtel - 2023 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 45 (4):1-33.
    The neuron doctrine, according to which nerves consist of discontinuous neurons, presented investigators with the challenge of determining what activities occurred between them or between them and muscles. One group of researchers, dubbed the sparks, viewed the electrical current in one neuron as inducing a current in the next neuron or in muscles. For them there was no gap between the activities of neurons or neurons and muscles that required filling with a new type of activity. A competing group, the (...)
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  • Methodological considerations for the mechanistic explanation of illusory representations in the context of psychopathology.Farshad Nemati - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-25.
    A mechanistic explanation is a desired outcome in many studies of perception. Such explanations require discovering the processes that contribute to the realization of a perceptual phenomenon at different levels of information processing. The present analysis aims at investigating the obstacles to develop such mechanistic explanations and their potential solutions in the context of psychopathology. Geometric-Optical Illusions (GOIs) are among perceptual phenomena that have been studied to understand psychopathology in various clinical populations. In the present analysis, the GOIs will be (...)
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  • Autonomous Systems and the Place of Biology Among Sciences. Perspectives for an Epistemology of Complex Systems.Leonardo Bich - 2021 - In Gianfranco Minati (ed.), Multiplicity and Interdisciplinarity. Essays in Honor of Eliano Pessa. Springer. pp. 41-57.
    This paper discusses the epistemic status of biology from the standpoint of the systemic approach to living systems based on the notion of biological autonomy. This approach aims to provide an understanding of the distinctive character of biological systems and this paper analyses its theoretical and epistemological dimensions. The paper argues that, considered from this perspective, biological systems are examples of emergent phenomena, that the biological domain exhibits special features with respect to other domains, and that biology as a discipline (...)
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  • Toward Mechanism 2.1: A Dynamic Causal Approach.Wei Fang - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):796-809.
    I propose a dynamic causal approach to characterizing the notion of a mechanism. Levy and Bechtel, among others, have pointed out several critical limitations of the new mechanical philosophy, and pointed in a new direction to extend this philosophy. Nevertheless, they have not fully fleshed out what that extended philosophy would look like. Based on a closer look at neuroscientific practice, I propose that a mechanism is a dynamic causal system that involves various components interacting, typically nonlinearly, with one another (...)
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  • A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology.John A. Dupre & Daniel J. Nicholson - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with (...)
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  • The Structure and Function of Experimental Control in the Life Sciences.Jutta Schickore - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (2):203-218.
    This article presents a new framework for the analysis of experimental control. The framework highlights different functions for experimental controls in the realization of an experiment: experimental controls that serve as tests and experimental controls that serve as probes. The approach to experimental control proposed here can illuminate the constitutive role of controls in knowledge production, and it sheds new light on the notion of exploratory experimentation. It also clarifies what can and what cannot be expected from reviewers of scientific (...)
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  • A Critique of Barbieri’s Code Biology Through Rosen’s Relational Biology: Reconciling Barbieri’s Biosemiotics with Peircean Biosemiotics.Federico Vega - 2018 - Biological Theory 13 (4):261-279.
    Biosemiotics argues that “sign” and “meaning” are two essential concepts for the explanation of life. Peircean biosemiotics, founded by Tomas Sebeok from Peirce’s semiotics and Jacob von Uexkül’s studies on animal communication, today makes up the mainstream of this discipline. Marcello Barbieri has developed an alternative account of meaning in biology based on the concept of code. Barbieri rejects Peircean biosemiotics on the grounds that this discipline opens the door to nonscientific approaches to biology through its use of the concept (...)
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  • Philosophy of Molecular Biology.Ingo Brigandt - 2018 - eLS: Encyclopedia of Life Sciences.
    Ongoing empirical discoveries in molecular biology have generated novel conceptual challenges and perspectives. Philosophers of biology have reacted to these trends when investigating the practice of molecular biology and contributed to scientific debates on methodological and conceptual matters. This article reviews some major philosophical issues in molecular biology. First, philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation yield a notion of explanation in the context of molecular biology that does not have to rely on laws of nature and comports well with molecular discovery. (...)
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  • New perspectives in the history of twentieth-century life sciences: historical, historiographical and epistemological themes.Robert Meunier & Kärin Nickelsen - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):19.
    The history of twentieth-century life sciences is not exactly a new topic. However, in view of the increasingly rapid development of the life sciences themselves over the past decades, some of the well-established narratives are worth revisiting. Taking stock of where we stand on these issues was the aim of a conference in 2015, entitled “Perspectives for the History of Life Sciences”. The papers in this topical collection are based on work presented and discussed at and around this meeting. Just (...)
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  • Performance-Similarity Reasoning as a Source for Mechanism Schema Evaluation.Raoul Gervais - 2020 - Topoi 39 (1):69-79.
    In this paper, I explicate and discuss performance-similarity reasoning as a strategy for mechanism schema evaluation, understood in Lindley Darden’s sense. This strategy involves inferring hypotheses about the mechanism responsible for cognitive capacities from premises describing the performance of those capacities; performance-similarity reasoning is a type of Inference to the Best Explanation, or IBE. Two types of such inferences are distinguished: one in which the performance of two systems is compared, and another when the performance of two systems under intervention (...)
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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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  • Reliability and Validity of Experiment in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.Sullivan Jacqueline Anne - 2007 - Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh
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  • Introduction: Points of Contact between Biology and History.Marie I. Kaiser & Daniel Plenge - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 1-23.
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  • The many faces of biological individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):761-773.
    Biological individuality is a major topic of discussion in biology and philosophy of biology. Recently, several objections have been raised against traditional accounts of biological individuality, including the objections of monism, theory-centrism, ahistoricity, disciplinary isolationism, and the multiplication of conceptual uncertainties. In this introduction, I will examine the current philosophical landscape about biological individuality, and show how the contributions gathered in this special issue address these five objections. Overall, the aim of this issue is to offer a more diverse, unifying, (...)
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  • Mechanisms, Experiments, and Theory-Ladenness: A Realist–Perspectivalist View.Marco Buzzoni - 2016 - Axiomathes 26 (4):411-427.
    The terms “perspectivism” and “perspectivalism” have been the focus of an intense philosophical discussion with important repercussions for the debate about the role of mechanisms in scientific explanations. However, leading exponents of the new mechanistic philosophy have conceded more than was necessary to the radically subjectivistic perspectivalism, and fell into the opposite error, by retaining not negligible residues of objectivistic views about mechanisms. In order to remove this vacillation between the subjective-cultural and the objective-natural sides of mechanisms, we shall raise (...)
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  • What was Hodgkin and Huxley’s Achievement?Arnon Levy - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (3):469-492.
    The Hodgkin–Huxley (HH) model of the action potential is a theoretical pillar of modern neurobiology. In a number of recent publications, Carl Craver ([2006], [2007], [2008]) has argued that the model is explanatorily deficient because it does not reveal enough about underlying molecular mechanisms. I offer an alternative picture of the HH model, according to which it deliberately abstracts from molecular specifics. By doing so, the model explains whole-cell behaviour as the product of a mass of underlying low-level events. The (...)
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  • The Metaphysics of Constitutive Mechanistic Phenomena.Marie I. Kaiser & Beate Krickel - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3).
    The central aim of this article is to specify the ontological nature of constitutive mechanistic phenomena. After identifying three criteria of adequacy that any plausible approach to constitutive mechanistic phenomena must satisfy, we present four different suggestions, found in the mechanistic literature, of what mechanistic phenomena might be. We argue that none of these suggestions meets the criteria of adequacy. According to our analysis, constitutive mechanistic phenomena are best understood as what we will call ‘object-involving occurrents’. Furthermore, on the basis (...)
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  • (1 other version)On the Incompatibility of Dynamical Biological Mechanisms and Causal Graph Theory.Marcel Weber - unknown
    I examine the adequacy of the causal graph-structural equations approach to causation for modeling biological mechanisms. I focus in particular on mechanisms with complex dynamics such as the PER biological clock mechanism in Drosophila. I show that a quantitative model of this mechanism that uses coupled differential equations – the well-known Goldbeter model – cannot be adequately represented in the standard causal graph framework, even though this framework does permit causal cycles. The reason is that the model contains dynamical information (...)
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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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  • Systems biology and the integration of mechanistic explanation and mathematical explanation.Ingo Brigandt - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):477-492.
    The paper discusses how systems biology is working toward complex accounts that integrate explanation in terms of mechanisms and explanation by mathematical models—which some philosophers have viewed as rival models of explanation. Systems biology is an integrative approach, and it strongly relies on mathematical modeling. Philosophical accounts of mechanisms capture integrative in the sense of multilevel and multifield explanations, yet accounts of mechanistic explanation have failed to address how a mathematical model could contribute to such explanations. I discuss how mathematical (...)
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  • Mechanistic Explanations and Models in Molecular Systems Biology.Fred C. Boogerd, Frank J. Bruggeman & Robert C. Richardson - 2013 - Foundations of Science 18 (4):725-744.
    Mechanistic models in molecular systems biology are generally mathematical models of the action of networks of biochemical reactions, involving metabolism, signal transduction, and/or gene expression. They can be either simulated numerically or analyzed analytically. Systems biology integrates quantitative molecular data acquisition with mathematical models to design new experiments, discriminate between alternative mechanisms and explain the molecular basis of cellular properties. At the heart of this approach are mechanistic models of molecular networks. We focus on the articulation and development of mechanistic (...)
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  • Transactive Memory Systems: A Mechanistic Analysis of Emergent Group Memory.Georg Theiner - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (1):65-89.
    Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel (1985) defined the notion of a transactive memory system (TMS) as a group level memory system that “involves the operation of the memory systems of the individuals and the processes of communication that occur within the group (p. 191). Those processes are the collaborative procedures (“transactions”) by which groups encode, store, and retrieve information that is distributed among their members. Over the past 25+ years, the conception of a TMS has progressively garnered an increased interest among (...)
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  • Information and the function of neurons.Marc Burock - 2011
    Many of us consider it uncontroversial that information processing is a natural function of the brain. Since functions in biology are only won through empirical investigation, there should be a significant body of unambiguous evidence that supports this functional claim. Before we can interpret the evidence, however, we must ask what it means for a biological system to process information. Although a concept of information is generally accepted in the neurosciences without critique, in other biological sciences applications of information, despite (...)
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  • What is a mechanism? Thinking about mechanisms across the sciences.Phyllis Illari & Jon Williamson - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (1):119-135.
    After a decade of intense debate about mechanisms, there is still no consensus characterization. In this paper we argue for a characterization that applies widely to mechanisms across the sciences. We examine and defend our disagreements with the major current contenders for characterizations of mechanisms. Ultimately, we indicate that the major contenders can all sign up to our characterization.
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  • Looking down, around, and up: Mechanistic explanation in psychology.William Bechtel - 2009 - Philosophical Psychology 22 (5):543-564.
    Accounts of mechanistic explanation have emphasized the importance of looking down—decomposing a mechanism into its parts and operations. Using research on visual processing as an exemplar, I illustrate how productive such research has been. But once multiple components of a mechanism have been identified, researchers also need to figure out how it is organized—they must look around and determine how to recompose the mechanism. Although researchers often begin by trying to recompose the mechanism in terms of sequential operations, they frequently (...)
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  • Some virtues of modeling with both hands.William Bechtel - unknown
    Webb distinguishes two endeavors she calls animal modeling and animat modeling and advocates for the former. I share her preference and point to additional virtues of modeling actual biological mechanisms (animal modeling). As Webb argues, animat modeling should be regarded as modeling of specific, but madeup, biological mechanisms. I contend that modeling made-up mechanisms in situations in which we have some knowledge of the actual mechanisms involved is modeling with one hand—the good one—tied behind one’s back.1 The hand that is (...)
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