Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?

Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.

  1. Arno G. Wouters (2007). Design Explanation: Determining the Constraints on What Can Be Alive. Erkenntnis 67 (1):65-80.
    This paper is concerned with reasonings that purport to explain why certain organisms have certain traits by showing that their actual design is better than contrasting designs. Biologists call such reasonings ‘functional explanations’. To avoid confusion with other uses of that phrase, I call them ‘design explanations’. This paper discusses the structure of design explanations and how they contribute to scientific understanding. Design explanations are contrastive and often compare real organisms to hypothetical organisms that cannot possibly exist. They are not causal but appeal to functional dependencies between an organism’s different traits. These explanations point out that because an organism has certain traits (e.g., it lives on land), it cannot be alive if the trait to be explained (e.g., having lungs) were replaced by a specified alternative (e.g., having gills). They can be understood from a mechanistic point of view as revealing the constraints on what mechanisms can be alive.
    Reading list   |  Discussion (1)  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | At my library
    29 downloads  |  Added to index: 2009-01-28  |  Mark as duplicate |  Remove from index
    Bookmark and Share


Discussion of Arno G. Wouters, Design explanation: Determining the constraints on what can be alive
Back    All discussions     Start a new thread
Order:
There is 1 thread in this forum
2009-12-24
Discussion of Arno G. Wouters, Design explanation: Determining the constraints on what can be aliveCan we make room for developmental constraints?
Marcello Pucciarelli

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Design explanations are explanations, or maybe just arguments, addressing questions about why certain organisms have some traits instead of others. For example, since tetrapods have lungs but don't have gills, it seems reasonable to ask why. Design explanations attempt to answer such questions by looking at functional dependencies and integration between different traits in the same organism. For example, we might start by looking at the functional requirements for respiration in a large organism living on land, invoke the relevant laws from physics or chemistry or biology, and show that having gills would make the organism less viable. 

Wouters proposes a schema for design explanations. In my words:

1) Specify the organism's properties and conditions of existence.
2) Assert that trait T possessed by the organism is more useful than alternative trait T'.
3) Provide an explanation of 2).

I see 2) as an undue limitation. Contrasting alternative traits is a very important strategy but we could ma ... (read more)
Latest replies: Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2561 Reply


Similar books and articles
  • Robert E. Cummins (1975). Functional Analysis. Journal of Philosophy 72 (November):741-64.
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation  | Other links: books.google.com links.jstor.org jstor.org   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • Cory D. Wright & William P. Bechtel (2007). Mechanisms and Psychological Explanation. In Paul Thagard (ed.), 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 (...)
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • Ron Sun (2001). Computation, Reduction, and Teleology of Consciousness. Cognitive Systems Research 1 (1):241-249.
    This paper aims to explore mechanistic and teleological explanations of consciousness. In terms of mechanistic explanations, it critiques various existing views, especially those embodied by existing computational cognitive models. In this regard, the paper argues in favor of the explanation based on the distinction between localist (symbolic) representation and distributed representation (as formulated in the connectionist literature), which reduces the phenomenological difference to a mechanistic difference. Furthermore, to establish a teleological explanation of consciousness, the paper discusses the issue of the (...)
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation  | Other links: cogsci.rpi.edu citeseer.ist.psu.edu linkinghub.elsevier.com ingentaconnect.com   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • Arno Wouters (2005). Functional Explanation in Biology. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 84 (1):269-293.
    This paper evaluates Kuipers' account of functional explanation in biology in view of an example of such an explanation taken from real biology. The example is the explanation of why electric fishes swim backwards (Lannoo and Lannoo 1993). Kuipers' account depicts the answer to a request for functional explanation as consisting only of statements that articulate a certain kind of consequence. It is argued that such an account fails to do justice to the main insight provided by the example explanation, (...)
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • Peter McLaughlin (2001). What Functions Explain: Functional Explanation and Self-Reproducing Systems. Cambridge University Press.
    This book offers an examination of functional explanation as it is used in biology and the social sciences, and focuses on the kinds of philosophical presuppositions that such explanations carry with them. It tackles such questions as: Why are some things explained functionally while others are not? What do the functional explanations tell us about how these objects are conceptualized? What do we commit ourselves to when we give and take functional explanations in the life sciences and the social sciences? (...)
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • D. Turner (2000). The Functions of Fossils: Inference and Explanation in Functional Morphology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 31 (1):193-212.
    This paper offers an account of the relationship between inference and explanation in functional morphology which combines Robert Brandon's theory of adaptation explanation with standard accounts of inference to the best explanation. Inferences of function from structure, it is argued, are inferences to the best adaptation explanation. There are, however, three different approaches to the problem of determining which adaptation explanation is the best. The theory of inference to the best adaptation explanation is then applied to a case study from (...)
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • Harold Kincaid (2004). Contextualism, Explanation and the Social Sciences. Philosophical Explorations 7 (3):201 – 218.
    Debates about explanation in the social sciences often proceed without any clear idea what an 'account' of explanation should do. In this paper I take a stance - what I will call contextualism - that denies there are purely formal and conceptual constraints on explanation and takes standards of explanation to be substantive empirical claims, paradigmatically claims about causation. I then use this standpoint to argue for position on issues in the philosophy of social science concerning reduction, idealized models, social (...)
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation  | Other links: informaworld.com   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • Jon Williamson & Phyllis McKay Illari, Mechanisms Are Real and Local.
    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’ (...)
    No categories
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | Share & More ...
  • Arno Wouters (1995). Viability Explanation. Biology and Philosophy 10 (4):435-457.
    This article deals with a type of functional explanation, viability explanation, that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of science. Viability explanations relate traits of organisms and their environments in terms of what an individual needs to survive and reproduce. I show that viability explanations are neither causal nor historical and that, therefore, they should be accounted for as a distinct type of explanation.
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...
  • C. Hitchcock (1999). Contrastive Explanation and the Demons of Determinism. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (4).
    It it tempting to think that if an outcome had some probability of not occurring, then we cannot explain why that outcome in fact occurred. Despite this intuition, most philosophers of science have come to admit the possibility of indeterministic explanation. Yet some of them continue to hold that if an outcome was not determined, it cannot be explained why that outcome rather than some other occurred. I argue that this is an untenable compromise: if indeterministic explanation is possible, then (...)
    Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |  
     
    My bibliography  |
     
    Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ...




    • Applied ethicsEpistemologyHistory of Western PhilosophyMeta-ethicsMetaphysicsNormative ethics
    Philosophy of biologyPhilosophy of languagePhilosophy of mindPhilosophy of religionScience Logic and MathematicsMore ...
    Home | New books and articles | Bibliographies | Philosophy journals | Discussions | The Categorization Project | About PhilPapers | Contact us

    Institute of Philosophy
    School of Advanced Study
    University of London     		Sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee as part of the
    Information Environment Programme     		Centre for Consciousness
    Research School of Social Sciences
    Australian National University

    Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
    All rights reserved by David Bourget and David Chalmers where applicable.