Reductionist Challenges to Explanatory Pluralism: Comment on McCauley

Explanatory Pluralism and The Heuristic Identity Theory

Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies, which microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and which antireductionists fear, offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed th...

Explanatory Pluralism and the Cognitive Science of Religion: or Why Scholars in Religious Studies Should Stop Worrying about Reductive Elimination of the Religious and Why Cognitive Science Poses No Threat to Religious

Prologue Nearly forty years ago when I was a graduate student (at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago) trying to envision how the theoretical tools, the findings, and the methods of the cognitive sciences might be brought to bear on religious phenomena, the universal response that such speculations elicited was some variation or other on the comment " Oh!. .. you are a reductionist...

Time Is of the Essence: Explanatory Pluralism and Accommodating Theories about Long-Term Processes

Explanatory pluralism in the medical sciences: theory and practice.

Explanatory pluralism is the view that the best form and level of explanation depends on the kind of question one seeks to answer by the explanation, and that in order to answer all questions in the best way possible, we need more than one form and level of explanation. In the first part of this article, we argue that explanatory pluralism holds for the medical sciences, at least in theory. How...

Polycentrism in Global Health Governance Scholarship; Comment on “Four Challenges That Global Health Networks Face”

Drawing on an in-depth analysis of eight global health networks, a recent essay in this journal argued that global health networks face four challenges to their effectiveness: problem definition, positioning, coalition-building, and governance. While sharing the argument of the essay concerned, in this commentary, we argue that these analytical concepts can be used to explicate a concept that h...