Explanations
Mechanistic explanations come in many forms. Wesley Salmon proposes an ontic view of what he calls "causal-mechanical" explanation, namely that explanations are in the world. There are two kinds of ontic explanation: etiological and constitutive. While Salmon focuses primarily on etiological explanation, with respect to which one explains some phenomenon P by identifying its causes (and, thus, locating it within the causal structure of the world). Constitutive (or componential) explanation, on the other hand, involves describing the components of a mechanism M that is productive of (or causes) P. Indeed, whereas (a) Noam Chomsky differentiates between descriptive and explanatory adequacy, where the former is defined as the adequacy of a theory to account for at least all the items in the domain (which need explaining), and the latter as the adequacy of a theory to account for no more than those domain items, and (b) past philosophies of science differentiate between descriptions of phenomena and explanations of those phenomena, in the metascientific context of mechanisms, descriptions and explanations seem to be identical. This is to say, to explain a mechanism M just is to describe it (specify its components, as well as background, enabling, and so on, conditions that constitute, in the case of a linear mechanism, its "start conditions").
Read more about this topic: Mechanism (biology)
Famous quotes containing the word explanations:
“We operate exclusively with things that do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces—how could explanations be possible at all when we initially turn everything into images, into our images!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them. They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)