Collaborative explanation, explanatory roles, and scientific explaining in practice

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Abstract

Scientific explanation is a perennial topic in philosophy of science, but the literature has fragmented into specialized discussions in different scientific disciplines. An increasing attention to scientific practice by philosophers is (in part) responsible for this fragmentation and has put pressure on criteria of adequacy for philosophical accounts of explanation, usually demanding some form of pluralism. This commentary examines the arguments offered by Fagan and Woody with respect to explanation and understanding in scientific practice. I begin by scrutinizing Fagan's concept of collaborative explanation, highlighting its distinctive advantages and expressing concern about several of its assumptions. Then I analyze Woody's attempt to reorient discussions of scientific explanation around functional considerations, elaborating on the wider implications of this methodological recommendation. I conclude with reflections on synergies and tensions that emerge when the two papers are juxtaposed and how these draw attention to critical issues that confront ongoing philosophical analyses of scientific explanation.

Introduction

Scientific explanation is a perennial topic in philosophy of science (Woodward, 2011), but the literature has developed from a coherent body of key papers and examples into a tangled skein of specialized discussions in different scientific disciplines with tenuous linkages. Instead of debating the relation between prediction and explanation in the deductive-nomological (D-N) model's handling of the flagpole-shadow counterexample, a contemporary reader is confronted with molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation in neural structures (Craver, 2007) or the thermodynamic complexity of discontinuities found in the formation of liquid drops (Batterman, 2005). Driving this transformation in the literature is a broader trend in philosophy of science: the increasing attention to scientific practice. Close scrutiny of the actual reasoning and material investigative practices of scientists “in the wild” has encouraged philosophers to engage in a kind of parasitic disciplinary specialization, following after those distinctive and heterogeneous patterns found in various subdisciplines of the sciences.

Although this is a salutary development in many respects, it has put pressure on the presumed criteria of adequacy for philosophical accounts of explanation, usually demanding some form of pluralism (i.e., there is no single metric for what counts as an explanation). Particular types of explanation from the physical sciences, where much of the 20th century debate about the nature of scientific explanation was forged, are no longer considered appropriate templates for analyzing how explanation operates elsewhere, such as in contemporary molecular biology. The papers by Fagan and Woody represent the leading edge of work on explanation and understanding in scientific practice, though each approaches these issues from a different angle. Fagan's paper starts from the trenches of systems biology to develop a new account—constitutive mechanistic explanation—that illuminates how collaborative interactions among component parts explain a system's working. Woody's paper operates at a meta-level and asks how analyses of explanation in practice might reorient philosophical endeavors to characterize and justify scientific explanation. In Section 2, I examine Fagan's concept of collaborative explanation, highlighting its distinctive advantages and expressing some concerns about a few of its assumptions. In Section 3, I analyze Woody's argument to reorient discussions of scientific explanation around functional considerations, such as the activity of explaining or the explanatory roles instantiated in different disciplinary communities, and elaborate on some of the implications of this approach. In closing, I offer some reflections on synergies and tensions that emerge when the two papers are juxtaposed and how these point toward critical issues that confront ongoing philosophical analyses of scientific explanation.

Section snippets

From complex constitution to collaborative mechanistic explanation

Although debates about the nature of scientific explanation continue to smolder unresolved, there is widespread agreement that the sciences are routinely engaged in some form of causal explanation. Despite a lack of consensus about its structure, as competing accounts indicate (Strevens, 2009, Woodward, 2003), this agreement forms a presumption in the literature on mechanistic explanation—mechanistic explanations are causal explanations (Craver, 2007). The crux of Fagan's argument is to show

Changing the rules of the game

Woody (2015) shifts register to a meta-level discussion about the methodological ramifications for philosophy of science that follow from a focus on scientific practice. She identifies three questions that philosophers might ask of explanations in science:

  • (1)

    What are the adequacy conditions for individual scientific explanations?

  • (2)

    How should explanatory power be justified as a theoretical virtue, if indeed it should be?

  • (3)

    What role does explanation play in science?

The majority of ink has been spilt on

Collaborative explanation and the functional roles of explanatory discourse

One of the most powerful synergies to emerge from considering these two papers side-by-side is that Woody's meta-level argument for a functional reorientation is resoundingly exemplified in Fagan's concrete account of collaborative explanation. If this strategy is bolstered by a continued increase in large teams of international scientists that coordinate diverse types of data and modes of analysis to produce multi-authored scientific papers, then look no further than systems biology. The

Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this commentary was presented in the symposium “Explanation and Understanding in Scientific Practice” at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in December 2013. Thanks to everyone in attendance for critical comments and helpful feedback, especially my co-symposiasts: Melinda Fagan and Andrea Woody. Thanks also to Joseph Rouse for organizing the symposium..

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