Abstract
The first part of this paper discusses two important meanings of robustness (robustness as stability as against variations in parameter values and robustness as consilience of results from different sources of evidence) and shows their essential connection with the notion of intersubjective reproducibility. As I shall maintain, robustness in both senses of the term is intimately connected with the notion of scientific experiment. This is the important element of truth of the mechanistic systems approach, which explains events as products of robust and regular systems and processes. In the second part of this paper I shall show that the concept of robustness of a mechanism, if applied to biological systems, is one-sided and incomplete without a heuristic˗methodical reference to final causes, even though the assumption of the teleological point of view is justified in biology only to the extent that we use it as a counterfactual artifice, capable of bringing to light causal relations which have a robustly reproducible content. In this way, the reflexive, typically human concept of purposefulness may be employed to investigate living beings scientifically, that is, in an intersubjectively testable and reproducible way, to discover mechanisms in living systems which are robust in both senses of the word.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Wilke 2006, p. 695, and Strand and Oftedal 2009. Among the numerous reports published on robustness in biology, cf. Barkai and Leibler 1997; Alon et al. 1999; von Dassow et al. 2000; Kitano et al. 2004; Kitano 2007; Félix and Barkoulas 2015. For the relation of robustness to resilience , see above all Thorén 2014, which is also a useful source of further references.
- 2.
Whewell [1840]1847, Vol. 2, pp. 65–66. Entirely ignored in the robustness debate in the philosophy of science, but in my opinion almost equally important, is Bridgman 1927, pp. 56–60, who employed the notion – though not the term – of robustness-as-consilience to the greatest extent, especially as a criterion for proving the physical reality of theoretical entities.
- 3.
For further arguments in support of this view, see for example Wimsatt (2007, chapter 10), according to whom “robustness has the right kind of properties as a criterion for the real […]. Furthermore, it works reliably as a criterion in the face of real world complexities, where we are judging the operational goodness of the criterion” (Wimsatt 2007, p. 197).
- 4.
On this point, cf. Buzzoni 2008, ch. 1.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Glennan 2010, for example, who exploits the mechanism concept to understand explanation in history and in the human sciences, gives no attention to the analysis of such concepts as teleology, purpose, aim or end (he does not even mention them). A partial exception is Craver 2013, in which a great importance is assigned to the teleological terminology and to the teleological stance. On the one hand, in contrast with the general tendency in the new mechanistic philosophy to remain silent on the issue of teleology, the term “teleology ” occurs many times in this paper, while it occurred only once, and then in an insignificant and accidental context, in Craver’s book of 2007 (cf. Craver 2007, p. 3). Craver 2013 recognizes that a “teleological feature” is involved in the fact that a mechanism “is explicitly defined in terms of what it does. The mechanism works from beginning to end, where the end is not what the mechanism invariably does but what we think it is supposed to do.” (Craver 2013, p. 140) On the other hand, Craver 2013 retains a far from negligible residue of objectivistic views about mechanisms. He writes that an “objective explanation”, which should express the objective or “ontic” (Salmon) character of scientific explanations, refers to “an objective portion of the causal structure of the world , to the set of factors that bring about or sustain a phenomenon”. For a discussion of this point, see Buzzoni 2016.
- 8.
Among some of the relatively old contributions to this debate, which however are not to be neglected, see for example Rosenblueth et al. 1943, Becker 1959 and 1969, Scheffler 1959, Wright 1968. Of course, the particular issue addressed in these papers, though closely connected, is not to be confounded with the more general issue of “proper functions”, which is not a matter that can appropriately be addressed here.
- 9.
Both examples are taken from Buzzoni 2015.
- 10.
Wang et al. 2004. It would be instructive to re-read Claude Bernard in the light of what I have been saying, but this is not the place to do this and I shall venture only a hint. Bernard tested poisons (above all curare, but also potassium cyanide and strychnine) in different circumstances, in order to get rid of misleading analogies and to see whether, how and to what extent they differ as regards their way of interfering with the different vital functions of living organisms . He used the poisonous substances as experimental devices, very precise scalpels that interrupt, and thus reveal, important causal correlations (see for example Bernard 1857 and Grmek 1966). As a scientist, he could legitimately ignore the reflexive, typically human concept of purposefulness or intentionality that he was, de facto, using to discover robust mechanisms in living beings. But his philosophical analysis is inadequate. On the one hand, it might be conceded, at least to a certain extent, that he understood that the “vital force” (force vitale), which distinguishes living beings from non-living beings, must be regarded, as one critic has said of teleology in Bernard, “as a necessary but subjective principle in biology” (Nils Roll-Hansen 1976, p. 73); and consistently with our view, Bernard writes that the “vital force ” is “une cause prochaine ou exécutive du phénomène vital, qui toujours est de nature physico-chimique, et tombe dans le domaine de l’expérimentateur.” (Bernard 1878, p. 53) But at other times Bernard uses the phrase “vital force” very ambiguously, if not contradictorily. He writes for example that the vital force must be considered as “une cause première, créatrice, législative et directrice de la vie, et inaccessible à nos connaissances” (Bernard 1878, p 53); where it is not easy to understand how it can be characterised as both “inaccessible to our knowledge ” and as “a primary cause – creative, legislative, and directive of life.”
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Acknowledgements
I presented an earlier version of this paper at the “Interdisciplinary Workshop on Robustness – Engineering Science” (Rome, February 5th – 6th, 2015). Thanks to all those who contributed to the discussion of the paper during and after the conference. Italian Ministry for Scientific Research (MIUR) provided funds for this research (PRIN 2012).
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Buzzoni, M. (2018). Robustness, Mechanism, and the Counterfactual Attribution of Goals in Biology. In: Bertolaso, M., Caianiello, S., Serrelli, E. (eds) Biological Robustness. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01198-7_3
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