Replacing Functional Reduction with Mechanistic Explanation
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
The status of functional explanation in psychology: Reduction and mechanistic explanation
The validity of functional explanations as they are commonly used in psychology has recently come under attack. Kim’s supervenience argument purports to prove that higher-level generalizations have no causal powers of their own, and hence are explanatorily irrelevant. In a nutshell, the supervenience argument forces us to either embrace epiphenomenalism of higherlevel properties, or accept Kim’...
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The ability to generalize from the known to the unknown is central to learning and inference. Two experiments explore the relationship between how a property is explained and how that property is generalized to novel species and artifacts. The experiments contrast the consequences of explaining a property mechanistically, by appeal to parts and processes, with the consequences of explaining the...
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Within modern philosophy of biology the topic of mechanistic explanation has become a central theme for critical discussion. The neo-mechanical philosophers have developed accounts that emphasize intervention and manipulation as the central epistemic tools that allow gaining epistemic access upon the mechanisms and have argued that the processes of inter-field integration across disciplines can...
متن کاملRethinking Mechanistic Explanation
Philosophers of science principally associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Peter Railton and Wesley Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon’s account of mechanisms in terms of the causal-nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms a...
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1 To appear in Synthese (Special Issue on Neuroscience and Philosophy). The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com Jonathan Waskan Department of Philosophy University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [email protected]
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Philosophia Naturalis
سال: 2011
ISSN: 0031-8027
DOI: 10.3196/003180211796334192