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  1. (1 other version)Rethinking mechanistic explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S342-353.
    Philosophers of science typically associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon's account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex-systems approach avoids certain (...)
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  • (1 other version)Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (S3):S342-S353.
    Philosophers of science typically associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon's account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex-systems approach avoids certain (...)
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  • Keep the chickens cooped: the epistemic inadequacy of free range metaphysics.Amanda Bryant - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):1867-1887.
    This paper aims to better motivate the naturalization of metaphysics by identifying and criticizing a class of theories I call ’free range metaphysics’. I argue that free range metaphysics is epistemically inadequate because the constraints on its content—consistency, simplicity, intuitive plausibility, and explanatory power—are insufficiently robust and justificatory. However, since free range metaphysics yields clarity-conducive techniques, incubates science, and produces conceptual and formal tools useful for scientifically engaged philosophy, I do not recommend its discontinuation. I do recommend, however, ending the (...)
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  • Robustness, Reliability, and Overdetermination (1981).William C. Wimsatt - 2012 - In Lena Soler (ed.), Characterizing the robustness of science: after the practice turn in philosophy of science. New York: Springer Verlag. pp. 61-78.
    The use of multiple means of determination to “triangulate” on the existence and character of a common phenomenon, object, or result has had a long tradition in science but has seldom been a matter of primary focus. As with many traditions, it is traceable to Aristotle, who valued having multiple explanations of a phenomenon, and it may also be involved in his distinction between special objects of sense and common sensibles. It is implicit though not emphasized in the distinction between (...)
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  • Robustness Analysis as Explanatory Reasoning.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (1):275-300.
    When scientists seek further confirmation of their results, they often attempt to duplicate the results using diverse means. To the extent that they are successful in doing so, their results are said to be robust. This paper investigates the logic of such "robustness analysis" [RA]. The most important and challenging question an account of RA can answer is what sense of evidential diversity is involved in RAs. I argue that prevailing formal explications of such diversity are unsatisfactory. I propose a (...)
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  • Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...)
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  • Emergent Properties.Hong Yu Wong - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.) Each (...)
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  • Levels of organization: a deflationary account.Markus I. Eronen - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (1):39-58.
    The idea of levels of organization plays a central role in the philosophy of the life sciences. In this article, I first examine the explanatory goals that have motivated accounts of levels of organization. I then show that the most state-of-the-art and scientifically plausible account of levels of organization, the account of levels of mechanism proposed by Bechtel and Craver, is fundamentally problematic. Finally, I argue that the explanatory goals can be reached by adopting a deflationary approach, where levels of (...)
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  • The (multiple) realization of psychological and other properties in the sciences.Kenneth Aizawa & Carl Gillett - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (2):181-208.
    Abstract: There has recently been controversy over the existence of 'multiple realization' in addition to some confusion between different conceptions of its nature. To resolve these problems, we focus on concrete examples from the sciences to provide precise accounts of the scientific concepts of 'realization' and 'multiple realization' that have played key roles in recent debates in the philosophy of science and philosophy of psychology. We illustrate the advantages of our view over a prominent rival account ( Shapiro, 2000 and (...)
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  • Aggregativity: Reductive heuristics for finding emergence.William C. Wimsatt - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (4):372-84.
    Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of the system's parts if it depends upon their mode of organization--a view consistent with reduction. Emergence can be analyzed as a failure of aggregativity--a state in which "the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts." Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different (...)
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  • A Field Guide to Mechanisms: Part I.Holly Andersen - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (4):274-283.
    In this field guide, I distinguish five separate senses with which the term ‘mechanism’ is used in contemporary philosophy of science. Many of these senses have overlapping areas of application but involve distinct philosophical claims and characterize the target mechanisms in relevantly different ways. This field guide will clarify the key features of each sense and introduce some main debates, distinguishing those that transpire within a given sense from those that are best understood as concerning distinct senses. The ‘new mechanisms’ (...)
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  • What does robustness teach us in climate science: a re-appraisal.Eric Winsberg - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 21):5099-5122.
    In the philosophy of climate science, debate surrounding the issue of variety of evidence has mostly taken the form of attempting to connect these issues in climate science and climate modeling with philosophical accounts of what has come to be known as “robustness analysis.” I argue that an “explanatory” conception of robustness is the best candidate for understanding variety of evidence in climate science. I apply the analysis to both examples of model agreement, as well at to the convergence of (...)
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  • No Levels, No Problems: Downward Causation in Neuroscience.Markus I. Eronen - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (5):1042-1052.
    I show that the recent account of levels in neuroscience proposed by Craver and Bechtel is unsatisfactory since it fails to provide a plausible criterion for being at the same level and is incompatible with Craver and Bechtel’s account of downward causation. Furthermore, I argue that no distinct notion of levels is needed for analyzing explanations and causal issues in neuroscience: it is better to rely on more well-defined notions such as composition and scale. One outcome of this is that (...)
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  • An externalist teleology.Gunnar Babcock & Daniel W. McShea - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8755-8780.
    Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological explanation. No (...)
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  • Robustness and reality.Markus I. Eronen - 2015 - Synthese 192 (12):3961-3977.
    Robustness is often presented as a guideline for distinguishing the true or real from mere appearances or artifacts. Most of recent discussions of robustness have focused on the kind of derivational robustness analysis introduced by Levins, while the related but distinct idea of robustness as multiple accessibility, defended by Wimsatt, has received less attention. In this paper, I argue that the latter kind of robustness, when properly understood, can provide justification for ontological commitments. The idea is that we are justified (...)
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  • Resolving teleology's false dilemma.Gunnar Babcock & Dan McShea - 2023 - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139 (4):415-432.
    This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological (...)
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  • Parts and theories in compositional biology.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (4):471-499.
    I analyze the importance of parts in the style of biological theorizing that I call compositional biology. I do this by investigating various aspects, including partitioning frames and explanatory accounts, of the theoretical perspectives that fall under and are guided by compositional biology. I ground this general examination in a comparative analysis of three different disciplines with their associated compositional theoretical perspectives: comparative morphology, functional morphology, and developmental biology. I glean data for this analysis from canonical textbooks and defend the (...)
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  • Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear.Jobst Landgrebe & Barry Smith - 2022 - Abingdon, England: Routledge.
    The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...)
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  • Scientific Reduction.Raphael van Riel & Robert Van Gulick - 2014 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Levels, Individual Variation and Massive Multiple Realization in Neurobiology.Kenneth Aizawa & Carl Gillett - 2009 - In John Bickle (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 539--582.
    Biologists seems to hold two fundamental beliefs: Organisms are organized into levels and the individuals at these levels differ in their properties. Together these suggest that there will be massive multiple realization, i.e. that many human psychological properties are multiply realized at many neurobiological levels. This paper provides some documentation in support of this suggestion.
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  • On emergence, agency, and organization.Stuart Kauffman & Philip Clayton - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (4):501-521.
    Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; (...)
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  • Upper-directed systems: a new approach to teleology in biology.Daniel W. McShea - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (5):663-684.
    How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence and their plasticity? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeking, and the evolutionary process itself—share a common organization. Specifically, they consist of an entity that moves within a larger containing structure, one that directs its behavior in a general way without precisely determining it. If so, then teleology lies within the domain of the theory (...)
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  • Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate.Julie Zahle & Finn Collin (eds.) - 2014 - Cham: Springer.
    This collection of papers investigates the most recent debates about individualism and holism in the philosophy of social science. The debates revolve mainly around two issues: firstly, whether social phenomena exist sui generis and how they relate to individuals. This is the focus of discussions between ontological individualists and ontological holists. Secondly, to what extent social scientific explanations may and should, focus on individuals and social phenomena respectively. This issue is debated amongst methodological holists and methodological individualists. -/- In social (...)
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  • Complexity begets crosscutting, dooms hierarchy.Joyce C. Havstad - 2021 - Synthese 198 (8):7665-7696.
    There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’. According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique and traditional. Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes (...)
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  • Synchronic and diachronic emergence.Paul Humphreys - 2008 - Minds and Machines 18 (4):431-442.
    I discuss here a number of different kinds of diachronic emergence, noting that they differ in important ways from synchronic conceptions. I argue that Bedau’s weak emergence has an essentially historical aspect, in that there can be two indistinguishable states, one of which is weakly emergent, the other of which is not. As a consequence, weak emergence is about tokens, not types, of states. I conclude by examining the question of whether the concept of weak emergence is too weak and (...)
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  • A Dilemma for Determination Pluralism (or Dualism).Ragnar van der Merwe - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (4):507-523.
    Douglas Edwards is arguably the most prominent contemporary advocate of moderate alethic pluralism. Significantly influenced by Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch, his work on the nature of truth has become widely discussed in the topical literature. Edwards labels his version of moderate alethic pluralism determination pluralism. At first blush, determination pluralism appears philosophically promising. The position deserves thoughtful consideration, particularly because of its capacity to accommodate the scope problem. I argue, however, that upon analysis the view is better understood as (...)
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  • Robustness, Diversity of Evidence, and Probabilistic Independence.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - In Uskali Mäki, Stéphanie Ruphy, Gerhard Schurz & Ioannis Votsis (eds.), Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 305-316.
    In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...)
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  • Goal directedness and the field concept.Gunnar Babcock & McShea Dan - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This paper offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decompositions when it comes to understanding physical fields. We argue that introducing the field concept, as it has been developed in field theory, alongside mechanisms is able to provide an account of goal directedness in the sciences.
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  • In Defense of Levels: Layer Cakes and Guilt by Association.Daniel S. Brooks - 2017 - Biological Theory 12 (3).
    Despite the ubiquity of “levels of organization” in the scientific literature, a nascent “levels skepticism” now claims that the concept of levels is an inherently flawed, misleading, or otherwise inadequate notion for understanding how life scientists produce knowledge about the natural world. However, levels skeptics rely on the maligned “layer-cake” account of levels stemming from Oppenheim and Putnam’s defense of the unity of science for their critical commentary. Recourse to layer-cake levels is understandable, as it is arguably the default conception (...)
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  • Robust realism for the life sciences.Markus I. Eronen - 2019 - Synthese 196 (6):2341-2354.
    Although scientific realism is the default position in the life sciences, philosophical accounts of realism are geared towards physics and run into trouble when applied to fields such as biology or neuroscience. In this paper, I formulate a new robustness-based version of entity realism, and show that it provides a plausible account of realism for the life sciences that is also continuous with scientific practice. It is based on the idea that if there are several independent ways of measuring, detecting (...)
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  • Hierarchies and levels of reality.Alexander Rueger & Patrick Mcgivern - 2010 - Synthese 176 (3):379-397.
    We examine some assumptions about the nature of 'levels of reality' in the light of examples drawn from physics. Three central assumptions of the standard view of such levels (for instance, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958) are (i) that levels are populated by entities of varying complexity, (ii) that there is a unique hierarchy of levels, ranging from the very small to the very large, and (iii) that the inhabitants of adjacent levels are related by the parthood relation. Using examples from (...)
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  • Moving beyond the subset model of realization: The problem of qualitative distinctness in the metaphysics of science.Carl Gillett - 2010 - Synthese 177 (2):165 - 192.
    Understanding the 'making-up' relations, to put things neutrally, posited in mechanistic explanations the sciences is finally an explicit topic of debate amongst philosophers of science. In particular, there is now lively debate over the nature of the so-called 'realization' relations between properties posited in such explanations. Despite criticism (Gillett, Analysis 62: 316-323, 2002a), the most common approach continues to be that of applying machinery developed in the philosophy of mind to scientific concepts in what is known as the 'Flat' or (...)
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  • (1 other version)Physicalism in an Infinitely Decomposable World.Barbara Montero - 2006 - Erkenntnis 64 (2):177-191.
    Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all fundamental phenomena (...)
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  • Philosophy of science in practice in ecological model building.Luana Poliseli, Jeferson G. E. Coutinho, Blandina Viana, Federica Russo & Charbel N. El-Hani - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):0-0.
    This article addresses the contributions of the literature on the new mechanistic philosophy of science for the scientific practice of model building in ecology. This is reflected in a one-to-one interdisciplinary collaboration between an ecologist and a philosopher of science during science-in-the-making. We argue that the identification, reconstruction and understanding of mechanisms is context-sensitive, and for this case study mechanistic modeling did not present a normative role but a heuristic one. We expect our study to provides useful epistemic tools for (...)
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  • Enactivism Meets Mechanism: Tensions & Congruities in Cognitive Science.Jonny Lee - 2023 - Minds and Machines 33 (1):153-184.
    Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic model’s emphasis on localisable and decomposable mechanisms, often neural in nature, runs contrary to the enactivist ethos. Despite appearances, this paper argues that mechanistic explanations of cognition, being neither narrow nor reductive, and compatible with plausible iterations of ideas like (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Mechanistic Causation and Constraints: Perspectival Parts and Powers, Non-perspectival Modal Patterns.Jason Winning - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1385-1409.
    Any successful account of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation must satisfy at least five key desiderata. In this article, I lay out these five desiderata and explain why existing accounts of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation fail to satisfy them. I then present an alternative account that does satisfy the five desiderata. According to this alternative account, we must resort to a type of ontological entity that is new to metaphysics, but not to science: constraints. In this article, I explain (...)
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  • Meeting the brain on its own terms.Philipp Haueis - 2014 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 815 (8):86890.
    In contemporary human brain mapping, it is commonly assumed that the “mind is what the brain does”. Based on that assumption, task-based imaging studies of the last three decades measured differences in brain activity that are thought to reflect the exercise of human mental capacities (e.g., perception, attention, memory). With the advancement of resting state studies, tractography and graph theory in the last decade, however, it became possible to study human brain connectivity without relying on cognitive tasks or constructs. It (...)
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  • (1 other version)Physicalism in an infinitely decomposable world.Barbara Montero - 2006 - Erkentnis 64 (2):177-191.
    Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all fundamental phenomena (...)
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  • Molecular shape, reduction, explanation and approximate concepts.Jeffry L. Ramsey - 1997 - Synthese 111 (3):233-251.
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  • The role of philosophy of science in Responsible Research and Innovation : the case of nanomedicine.Gry Oftedal - 2014 - Life Sciences, Society and Policy 10 (1):1-12.
    Research on ethical, legal and social aspects of life sciences and new technologies has mainly been focused on impacts and consequences, while the emerging framework of Responsible Research and Innovation focuses rather on increased involvement and reflexivity in research processes to foster science and technology that better answers the needs of society. I argue that philosophy of science should be a central feature of RRI and demonstrate how the philosophy of science can contribute in this sense. I show how investigating (...)
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  • Non-transitive Parthood, Leveled Mereology, and the Representation of Emergent Parts of Processes.Johanna Seibt - 2014 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 91:161-190.
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  • Mead and the Emergence of the Joint Intentional Self.Lawrence Cahoone - 2019 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 11 (2).
    What is the core of the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens? Some of the most famous hypotheses include tool use and tool making, language, free will and moral agency, self-consciousness, mind itself, and reason or rational problem-solving. All these answers are partly true. But recent work in comparative psychology, primatology, and cognitive science have converged on a conception of human distinctiveness that underlies these. Remarkably, it was explored a century ago by George Herbert Mead. The American pragmatists played a special role (...)
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  • Sustainability assessment and complementarity.Hugo F. Alrøe & Egon Noe - 2016 - Ecology and Society 21 (1):30.
    Sustainability assessments bring together different perspectives that pertain to sustainability in order to produce overall assessments and a wealth of approaches and tools have been developed in the past decades. But two major problematics remain. The problem of integration concerns the surplus of possibilities for integration; different tools produce different assessments. The problem of implementation concerns the barrier between assessment and transformation; assessments do not lead to the expected changes in practice. This paper aims to analyze issues of complementarity in (...)
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  • Cancer Modeling: the Advantages and Limitations of Multiple Perspectives.A. Plutynski - 2019 - In Michela Massimi & Casey D. Mccoy (eds.), Understanding Perspectivism (Open Access): Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects. New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
    Cancer is a paradigmatic case of a complex causal process; causes of cancer operate at a variety of temporal and spatial scales, and the respects in which these causes act and interact are diverse. There are, for instance, temporal order effects, organizational effects, structural effects, and dynamic relationships between causes operating at different temporal and spatial scales. Because of this complexity, models of cancer initiation and progression often involve deliberate choices to focus on one time scale, one causal pathway, or (...)
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  • Musical pluralism and the science of music.Adrian Currie & Anton Killin - 2016 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 6 (1):9-30.
    The scientific investigation of music requires contributions from a diverse array of disciplines. Given the diverse methodologies, interests and research targets of the disciplines involved, we argue that there is a plurality of legitimate research questions about music, necessitating a focus on integration. In light of this we recommend a pluralistic conception of music—that there is no unitary definition divorced from some discipline, research question or context. This has important implications for how the scientific study of music ought to proceed: (...)
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  • A Bridge Too Far – Revisited: Reframing Bruer’s Neuroeducation Argument for Modern Science of Learning Practitioners.Jared C. Horvath & Gregory M. Donoghue - 2016 - Frontiers in Psychology 7.
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  • Again, what the philosophy of biology is not.Werner Callebaut - 2005 - Acta Biotheoretica 53 (2):93-122.
    There are many things that philosophy of biology might be. But, given the existence of a professional philosophy of biology that is arguably a progressive research program and, as such, unrivaled, it makes sense to define philosophy of biology more narrowly than the totality of intersecting concerns biologists and philosophers (let alone other scholars) might have. The reasons for the success of the “new” philosophy of biology remain poorly understood. I reflect on what Dutch and Flemish, and, more generally, European (...)
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  • Toward a Macroevolutionary Theory of Human Evolution: The Social Protocell.Claes Andersson & Petter Törnberg - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (2):86-102.
    Despite remarkable empirical and methodological advances, our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary processes that made us human remains fragmented and contentious. Here, we make the radical proposition that the cultural communities within which Homo emerged may be understood as a novel exotic form of organism. The argument begins from a deep congruence between robust features of Pan community life cycles and protocell models of the origins of life. We argue that if a cultural tradition, meeting certain requirements, arises in the (...)
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  • Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General Framework.Christian List - 2024 - In Katie Robertson & Alastair Wilson (eds.), Levels of Explanation. Oxford University Press.
    This expository paper presents a general framework for representing levels and inter-level relations. The framework is intended to capture both epistemic and ontological notions of levels and to clarify the sense in which levels of explanation might or might not be related to a levelled ontology. The framework also allows us to study and compare different kinds of inter-level relations, especially supervenience and reduction but also grounding and mereological constitution. This, in turn, enables us to explore questions such as whether (...)
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  • The Varieties of Molecular Explanation.Marco J. Nathan - 2012 - Philosophy of Science 79 (2):233-254.
    Reductionists in biology claim that all biological events can be explained in terms of genes and macromolecules alone, while antireductionists argue that some biological events must be explained at a higher level. The literature, however, does not distinguish between different kinds of molecular explanation. The goal of this article is to identify and analyze three such kinds. The analysis of molecular explanations herein carries an important philosophical implication; in shunning crude reductionism and extreme versions of holism, we can combine the (...)
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