Mechanism Discovery and Design Explanation: Where Role Function Meets Biological Advantage Function
| Autor: | Julie Mennes, Dingmar van Eck |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Cognitive science Philosophy of science Generality Systems biology media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences Role function General Social Sciences Design elements and principles 050905 science studies 03 medical and health sciences Philosophy 030104 developmental biology History and Philosophy of Science Mechanism (philosophy) 0509 other social sciences Heuristics Function (engineering) media_common |
| Zdroj: | Journal for General Philosophy of Science. 49:413-434 |
| ISSN: | 0925-4560 |
| Popis: | In the recent literature on explanation in biology, increasing attention is being paid to the connection between design explanation and mechanistic explanation, viz. the role of design principles and heuristics for mechanism discovery and mechanistic explanation. In this paper we extend the connection between design explanation and mechanism discovery by prizing apart two different types of design explanation and by elaborating novel heuristics that one specific type offers for mechanism discovery across species. We illustrate our claims in terms of two lines of biological research on the biological advantages of organismal traits, one on the eye-size of giant squid, the other on foraging habits of specific bat species. We argue that this research illustrates useful heuristics for mechanism discovery across species, viz. reasoning strategies to infer likely mechanisms for a certain biological role based on assessments of the environmental conditions in which the role is performed efficiently (i.e., offers a biological advantage) and less or in-efficiently. We bring out the novel features of our analysis in terms of a comparison with mechanistic approaches to mechanism discovery, amongst which graph-theoretical ones, and by comparing the different types of design explanation and the discovery heuristics they support. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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