Towards the Methodological Turn in the Philosophy of Science - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 2

scientists should do it. This application of Hume's guillotine is one of the prevailing
trends in the late twentieth century and is sometimes considered as a kind of
naturalism. Philosophical naturalism is received in various ways. Despite the
opposition of supernaturalistic or a priori explanations, as the name suggests, the
main theme of naturalism is to align philosophy of science with science and to pay
special attention to scientific methods. A sophisticated investigation of the naturali-
zation of philosophy of science requires addressing the questions of how philoso-
phy is naturalized to a specific science and in what respects particular sciences and
philosophies of those sciences are similar to one another (Giere 1999 , 2008 ). In
contrast, a broadly defined naturalism, which is widely shared by philosophers of
science (even by those who do not identify themselves as naturalistic philosophers
of science), suggests a two-way study: It on the one hand focuses on scientific
practices that matter to philosophical investigations and on the other hand examines
philosophical concepts in terms of scientists' work and the devices they employ. 1
More importantly, as Ronald Giere ( 2008 ) points out, philosophical naturalism
in turn implies a methodological stance . What Giere means is to characterize
naturalism as a method that seeks a naturalistic explanation (Giere 2008 , p. 214).
However, it can be easily extended to a more general naturalistic program that
stresses scientific methods. William Bechtel ( 2008 , p. 8) well describes this type of
position by stating that the naturalistic philosophy of science attempts to understand
science by addressing the following questions: What are the objectives of scientific
inquiry? What methods are used to obtain the results? How are the methods and
results of science evaluated? How do value issues impinge on the conduct of
science? Since the answers to Bechtel's questions crucially require examining
scientific methods, the philosophical perspective offered by naturalism necessarily
turns to methodology. This edited volume contributes to such a methodological turn
in the philosophy of science.
In this edited volume, we specifically investigate mechanism and causality in
biology and economics. Why do we target mechanism and causality? Despite the
fact that they both stand long as important conceptions in the philosophy of science,
causality and mechanism are two main guiding ideas that underlie scientists'
practices of making explanations. To identify the characteristics of a scientific
explanation, we need first to explore what causality and mechanism are and how
scientists infer their existence, then conjoin the discussion of causality with that of
mechanism for a comparative study.
We particularly focus on the context of biology and economics for three reasons.
First, recent developments in the philosophy of science have shown that the
philosophy of biology and economics are two of the most fertile fields. The findings
in these subdisciplines not only posit serious challenges to but also provide novel
ideas for traditional accounts in the philosophy of science that are based mainly on
the physical sciences. Second, the current trend of investigating biological or
1 This point is also suggested in Bechtel ( 2008 , pp. 8-9). For philosophical investigations of
scientific devices, examples are experimental and observational instruments by Ian Hacking
( 1983 ), models by Mary Morgan and Margret Morrison ( 1999 ), and by the semantic or model-
based view philosophers such as Ronald Giere ( 1988 , 1999 ) and Bas van Fraassen ( 1980 , 1989 ).