Unpublished draft

Types of explanations in biology

Much of classical philosophy of science I’ve read in my school years was built on the language of laws and reduction, following 20th century physics. As I entered biology, I found scientists working with an entirely different explanatory language.

  1. Mechanistic models

The “new mechanist” program in philosophy of science is basically the claim that a big fraction of successful explanations in life sciences looks less like a “law of nature”, and more like this:

From SEP, adapted from Craver,
From SEP, adapted from Craver,

Explaining some phenomenon S mechanistically from beginning to end means treating this phenomenon as a black box that can be opened up