Dear All
Although the regular season is in recess, Paul Griffiths has kindly
offered a talk for this Wed 18 at 3.30. Take a break from your marking!
Grad talk for those around at 2 in the dept seminar room
Reductive explanation and explanatory force
J.J.C Smart (1959) argued that biology is a form of engineering.
Biology uses physics and chemistry to explain the working of specific
mechanisms, albeit naturally occurring ones. Marcel Weber (2005) has
christened this ‘explanatory heteronomy’: the force of biological
explanations comes from physical laws. He describes this as a form of
reductionism. I examine his assumptions about how the force of an
explanation ‘distributes’ over its components and argue that the force
of typical biological explanations derives from their distinctively
biological initial and boundary conditions, not the laws that operate
within them. I claim that explanatory heteronomy is compatible with
typical anti-reductionist positions in recent philosophy of biology.
cheers
d
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