Abstract
Chapter 5 serves two purposes: It specifies which understanding of ‘ontic’ underlies characterizing my account of explanatory reduction as ontic and it clarifies how questions about explanation are related to questions about explanatory reduction. I show that discussions about accounts of reduction are independent from questions about explanation but that debates about explanatory reductionism, in fact, boil down to specific questions about explanation, namely, to questions about the adequacy of higher- and lower-level explanations. How one answers these questions depends on one’s stance on the pragmatics of explanation. I develop a refined version of van Fraassen’s pragmatic account of explanation that clarifies in which sense the adequacy of explanation is far from subjective or exclusively determined by pragmatic factors.
“[S]cientists nowadays increasingly question the validity of reductive explanations… The debate between reductionists and antireductionists is thus very much a debate about what constitutes a good scientific explanation.” (Marc H. V. van Regenmortel 2004b, 145)
“[T]he debate [about reductionism] cannot be a dispute about ‘explanation’, for example a disagreement about pragmatic, erotetic, Protagorean versus nonerotetic accounts of explanation. For that is a general problem in the philosophy of science, not a problem about reductionism in the philosophy of biology.” (Alex Rosenberg 2006, 41, fn. 6)
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Notes
- 1.
I use the term ‘explanation’ as a success term. This is why, properly speaking, inadequate, failed or unsuccessful explanations do not exist. If an explanation of a phenomenon turns out to be inadequate or fails to succeed the putative explanation proves not to be an explanation at all. Note that this is compatible with the thesis that explanations can vary in quality. Explanations can be worse, but still be explanations. Despite this decision I sometimes use phrases such as ‘adequate explanation’ (which is, strictly speaking, done twice) since this is the easier way of expressing something clearly.
- 2.
Although I agree that, broadly conceived, explanations are answers to explanation-seeking why-questions, one should notice that explanations can be answers to other kinds of questions, too – for instance to how-questions, what-for-questions, etc. (e.g., Beatty 1990, 203; Dupré 1993, 106). These different kinds of questions point to different types of explanation (see Sect. 4.3.3).
- 3.
Hempel uses the term ‘law’ as an epistemic notion. That is, he refers with it to law statements. In this section I will adopt this way of speaking. However, in the contemporary debate it has become established to speak of law statements and to use the term law as an ontological notion. In the rest of my book I therefore assume this more common reading.
- 4.
In response to this objection some have adopted the so called “hidden structure strategy” (Woodward 2003, 159, 2011, Section 2.6): Hempel (1965), for example, argues that explanations of particular phenomena sometimes are merely partial or elliptical explanations (that do not involve law statements), but that in all these cases there exists an underlying explanation, which makes explicit reference to laws.
- 5.
The primary motivation for this change was Salmon’s concerns about counterfactuals (1994).
- 6.
Craver, for instance, emphasizes that his goal is to “construct a normatively adequate mechanistic model of constitutive explanation (henceforth, mechanistic explanation)” (2007a, 111).
- 7.
For instance, he writes that “explanatory knowledge is knowledge of causal mechanisms… that produce the phenomena with which we are concerned” (Salmon 1989, 128).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Granted, in most of these cases there are also explanations available that are not only etiological, but constitutive as well. For instance, the explanation of the death of a man by him being poisoned may involve a description of the causal mechanism of how the poison is absorbed, how the cellular metabolism is affected by the poison, and how this causes certain symptoms of poisoning. But this is not how the explanans in these cases typically is characterized. Usually, philosophers discuss whether the poisoning causes (and causally explains) the death of a man, not whether certain underlying physiological mechanisms cause (and causally explain) the death of a man. Hence, the way that Salmon and others in fact discuss these examples shows that they focus on etiological causal explanations. But this does not imply that the phenomena they discuss could, in principle, not be explained also in an etiological-constitutive manner.
- 11.
In this spirit several mechanists try to broaden the scope of the mechanistic account. For example, Craver argues that etiological and functional explanations are subtypes of mechanistic explanation (2007a, 107, 2013), Skipper and Millstein (2005) apply the mechanistic conception to natural selection explanations, and Glennan (2010) claims that it also holds for historical explanations.
- 12.
Strevens deviates from Salmon’s terminology and calls his account an “ontology-first approach to explanation” (2008, 7).
- 13.
Salmon characterizes inferential conceptions, such as Hempel’s DN and his IS model, and erotetic conceptions, such as van Fraassen’s pragmatic account of explanation (which will be discussed in Sect. 4.3), as epistemic conceptions of explanation.
- 14.
A similar statement can be found in Bechtel 2006, 31f.
- 15.
In her paper, Phyllis Illari argues that philosophers should not focus on either kind of constraint, but rather recognize both and seek an integration of them.
- 16.
Strevens, for example, simply states that “[e]ither sense may be given precedence” and that he follows “the lead of most philosophers of explanation” (2008, 6) in giving precedence to the ontological sense of explanation. I doubt that Strevens is right in his assessment of what most philosophers of explanation do (see, e.g., Mitchell 2009; Woodward 2003, 2011; Brigandt 2013).
- 17.
This point is also emphasized by Sarkar (1998, 9).
- 18.
I use the term ‘factor’ as an ontological term (i.e., ‘factor’ refers to some entity in the world). At the same time the term should be as ontologically uncommitted as possible. It may refer to causes, relations, processes, regularities, universals, facts, activities, or whatever one’s ontology and theory of explanation demand. Sets of factors thus are what is being represented in explanations, not what constitutes the explanation itself.
- 19.
Gene-selectionist explanations are evolutionary explanations that explain evolutionary processes exclusively by appealing to selection processes at the level of genes (see Dawkins 1976; Wimsatt 1980). But it remains a controversially disputed question whether natural selection explanations are to be characterized as non-causal explanations (e.g., Sarkar 2005, 117–143).
- 20.
Despite this, reductive causal explanations will occupy center stage in my analysis since they are the paradigmatic and most important examples of reductive explanations in biology. Non-causal explanations are more often examples of non-reductive explanations (e.g., the topological explanation of dominance; see also Sarkar 1998, 169–173, 2005, 98).
- 21.
Strictly speaking, I should say “grounds on which reductive representations of biological phenomena prove to be non-explanatory” since I use ‘explanation’ as a success term. But as such a way of speaking is less intelligible I accept the minor inaccuracy involved in using the term ‘inadequate explanation’.
- 22.
- 23.
For the corresponding notion of a level of organization see Chap. 6, Sect. 1.2 and Kaiser (manuscript a).
- 24.
Note that this dispute does not concern the difference between better and worse explanations, but rather the question of whether higher- and lower-level explanations are adequate (i.e., explanatory) at all.
- 25.
This is not to say that the question whether subsuming phenomena under laws or capturing causal relations is more important for explanation is irrelevant for the issue of reduction. Because Nagel’s model of theory reduction presupposes the DN model, the adequacy of DN models is crucial for discussions about reduction that remain inside the Nagelian framework. But if one abandons Nagel’s understanding of reduction, the dispute between CL and CM models of explanation loses significance, too.
- 26.
In Chap. 6, Sect. 5 I will, however, argue that not all mechanistic explanations need to be lower-level explanations. Some mechanistic explanations include factors that are external to the corresponding system and that cannot be said to be lower-level factors (at least not according to my account of levels of organization; cf. Kaiser manuscript a).
- 27.
Another important representative of the erotetic version of the epistemic conception of explanation (to adopt Salmon’s terminology) is Peter Achinstein (1983).
- 28.
For more details on van Fraassen’s theory of explanation see 1980, 134–157. For a summary of van Fraassen’s account see Kitcher and Salmon 1987, 317–319.
- 29.
The choice of R is sometimes entangled with the specification of the explanandum phenomenon. This is the reason why the choice of R often is indicated by the form of the question about the phenomenon that calls for the explanation. For instance, some philosophers have claimed that explanations of how something does what it does call for mechanistic explanations, whereas explanations of what something does call for explanations that include contextual factors (e.g., Duprè 1993, 106, 2009, 37).
- 30.
If this were the case we would say that these different specifications constitute distinct relevance relations.
- 31.
This weak form of explanatory pluralism might even be compatible with the claim that, despite this diversity of explanations, there exists an underlying notion of explanatory relevance that is true for all (scientific) explanations.
- 32.
Some philosophers even try to identify the one notion of explanatory relevance that holds for all causal explanations (e.g., Woodward 2003). But, as mentioned above, I think it is more promising to pay attention to the different types of causal explanation that are available in scientific practice and to specify different corresponding relevance relations. However, this does not preclude the possibility that there exists a general notion of explanatory relevance that is true for all causal explanations.
- 33.
Some pragmatist-minded antireductionists endorse the more moderate claim that there is not “the right” level of explanation independent from any context.
- 34.
Note that this is a different notion of depth than the one Hitchcock and Woodward (2003) employ. According to their view, a generalization provides deeper explanations when they are “more general” (2003, 198) with respect to hypothetical changes in the system at hand (not with respect to other systems than the system whose behavior is to be explained).
- 35.
This is why Potochnik argues that they exhibit “different types of generality” (2009, 64).
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Kaiser, M.I. (2015). A Closer Look at Biological Explanations. In: Reductive Explanation in the Biological Sciences. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25310-7_5
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