Online research in philosophy

This paper argues that besides mechanistic explanations, there is a kind of explanation that relies upon “topological” properties of systems in order to derive the explanandum as a consequence, and which does not consider mechanisms or causal processes. I first investigate topological explanations in the case of ecological research on the stability of ecosystems. Then I contrast them with mechanistic explanations, thereby distinguishing the kind of realization they involve from the realization relations entailed by mechanistic explanations, and explain how both kinds of explanations may be articulated in practice. The second section, expanding on the case of ecological stability, considers the phenomenon of robustness at all levels of the biological hierarchy in order to show that topological explanations are indeed pervasive there. Reasons are suggested for this, in which “neutral network” explanations are singled out as a form of topological explanation that spans across many levels. Finally, I appeal to the distinction of explanatory regimes to cast light on a controversy in philosophy of biology, the issue of contingence in evolution, which is shown to essentially involve issues about realization.

This paper discusses various problems of explanations by mechanisms. Two positions are distinguished: the narrow position claims that only explanations by mechanisms are acceptable. It is argued that this position leads to an infinite regress because the discovery of a mechanism must entail the search for other mechanisms etc. Another paradoxical consequence of this postulate is that every successful explanation by mechanisms is unsatisfactory because it generates new ``black box'' explanations. The second – liberal – position that is advanced in this paper regards, besides explanations by mechanisms, also the discovery of bivariate correlations as a first step of an explanation by mechanisms as meaningful. It is further argued that there is no contradiction between causal analysis and the explanation by mechanisms. Instead, explanations by mechanisms always presuppose the analysis of causal structures (but not vice versa). The final point is that an explanation by mechanisms is not inconsistent with the Hempel-Oppenheim scheme of explanation.

Evolutionary biology teaches that all biological complexity is the result of material mechanisms. These include principally the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation, but also include other mechanisms (symbiosis, gene transfer, genetic drift, the action of regulatory genes in development, self-organizational processes, etc.). These mechanisms are just that: mindless material mechanisms that do what they do irrespective of intelligence. To be sure, mechanisms can be programmed by an intelligence. But any such intelligent programming of evolutionary mechanisms is not properly part of evolutionary biology.

Mechanisms have become much-discussed, yet there is still no consensus on how to characterise them. In this paper, we start with something everyone is agreed on – that mechanisms explain – and investigate what constraints this imposes on our metaphysics of mechanisms. We examine two widely shared premises about how to understand mechanistic explanation: (1) that mechanistic explanation offers a welcome alternative to traditional laws-based explanation and (2) that there are two senses of mechanistic explanation that we call ‘epistemic explanation’ and ‘physical explanation’. We argue that mechanistic explanation requires that mechanisms are both real and local. We then go on to argue that real, local mechanisms require a broadly active metaphysics for mechanisms, such as a capacities metaphysics.

This article argues that it is possible to bring the social sciences into evolutionary focus without being committed to a thesis the author calls ontological reductionism, which is a widespread predilection for lower-level explanations. After showing why we should reject ontological reductionism, the author argues that there is a way to construe cultural evolution that does justice to the autonomy of social science explanations. This paves the way for a liberal approach to explanation the author calls explanatory pluralism, which allows for the possibility of explaining cultural phenomena in terms of different evolutionary processes. Key Words: cultural evolution • reductionism • explanatory pluralism • evolutionary psychology.

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that there is more than one explanation for this phenomenon. I use the concept of a domain to more clearly explicate the various explananda that can be found in this case. I argue that although pluralism with respect to some types of domains can be decreased using van Fraassen’s pragmatics of explanation, there remains an important class of domain, an orthogonal domain, for which this is not the case.

Philosophers of the social sciences are increasingly convinced that macro-and micro-explanations are complementary. Whereas macro-explanations are broad, micro-explanations are deep. I distinguish between weak and strong complementarity: Strongly complementary explanations improve one another when integrated, weakly complementary explanations do not. To demonstrate the explanatory autonomy of different levels of explanation, explanatory pluralists mostly presuppose the weak form of complementarity. By scrutinizing the notions of explanatory depth and breadth, I argue that macro- and micro-accounts of the same phenomenon are more often strongly complementary. This invites a revision of the pluralist position in which integration promotes explanatory progress. Key Words: explanatory pluralism • social science • explanatory depth • explanatory breadth • mechanism.

Chemists take mechanisms to be an important way of explaining chemical change. I examine the usefulness of the mechanism approach in the recent philosophical literature in explicating the explanatory use of mechanisms by organic chemists. I argue that chemists consider a mechanism to be explanatory because it accounts for the “dynamic process of bringing about” (Tabery 2004 , 10) chemical change. For chemists, mechanisms are causal explanations based on interventions that show “how some possibilities depend on others” (Woodward 2003 , 375). Only possibilities are achievable because chemists face a number of challenges when they explain by means of a mechanism. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063; e‐mail: jramsey@smith.edu.

There is more than one explanation for the evolution of sexual reproduction. This paper investigates the possibility that this pluralism exists because these different explanations rely on intuitions provided by different philosophical theories of explanation, namely unifying views and causal mechanical views. I conclude that this is not the case.

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a striking case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that one needs to refer to more than one explanation in order to adequately account for it. I develop the concept a domain of phenomena in order to analysis this pluralism. Pluralism exists when a phenomenon can be included in more that one homogeneous domain or in a heterogeneous domain. I argue that in some cases domain partitioning can be used to decrease pluralism, but that in the case of sex domains are overlapping and interconnecting, or in other words bear an orthogonal relationship to one another, and hence cannot be partitioned in such a way as to eliminate pluralism.