Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Introduction
Over a decade ago Machamer et al. ( 2000 ) suggested that the philosophy of science,
especially the biological sciences, could usefully be reconfigured by thinking about
how scientists construct, evaluate, and revise their understanding of mechanisms.
They boldly asserted that traditional philosophical topics such as causation, discov-
ery, explanation, functions, laws, levels, models, and reduction would be funda-
mentally transformed by recognizing the centrality to many areas of science of the
search for mechanisms. The revolution they envisioned replaced the last vestiges of
the once-received positivist gestalt with a new mechanistic vision, expressed in the
very language in which scientists talk about their work and sensitive to problems
faced within mechanistic research programs in areas as diverse as biology, cogni-
tive science, ecology, and neuroscience.
Though this way of thinking about the philosophy of science has gained rapid
and widespread acceptance, it has unsurprisingly attracted a good deal of criticism
from those who wonder whether the mechanical philosophy is really as revolution-
ary as its proponents suggest and from those who think that traditional ways of
thinking about the philosophy of science address problems that the mechanical
philosophy is ill equipped to handle. And one might be forgiven for thinking that
there is no more central battleground in that debate than the perennial issue of the
laws of nature. Positivist philosophy of science and its descendents place the
concept of a law of nature at the very heart of their thinking about causation,
explanation, prediction, and reduction in particular. From that traditional vantage
point, it is reasonable to ask precisely how the concept of mechanism, which plays
many of the same roles in the new paradigm, is related to the concept of a law of
nature.
So conceived, one naturally sees the concept of mechanism as replacement for
the concept of laws. And indeed, a casual reading of the mechanistic literature
would give the impression that this is precisely what the mechanists intended to do.
Mechanists regularly note that the term “law” is descriptively out of place in the
biological sciences. Biologists and other scientists of the middle range (neuro-
scientists, physiologists, psychologists, etc.) seem to avoid the term “law” and
conceive of their work instead in terms of the discovery of mechanisms. Further-
more, the mechanist's rejection of a law-centered picture of science is a part of their
general rejection of the “Euclidean ideal” (Schaffner 2008 ) of science, according to
which knowledge is arranged in closed deductive axiomatic systems with strict law
statements as the axioms. How, they ask, would the philosophy of science look if
this formal gestalt, which had already worn quite thin in places, were replaced by a
more material, mechanistic, gestalt: one emphasizing the causal structures that
scientists much more frequently discuss (see Craver 2002 )? Seeing the mechanistic
project in this light leads one to ask, as Bert Leuridan ( 2010 ) does in a recent paper,
whether mechanisms can really replace laws at the heart of our thinking about
science.
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