Mechanism and Pluralism, Concrete and Ideal

Carla Fehr
Department of Philosophy, Iowa State University

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     Last modified: February 23, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 4:00 PM in MACK 236
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Abstract
There is an under-explored tension in the philosophy of biology between explanatory pluralism and mechanistic explanation. Explanatory pluralism is the acceptance of multiple explanations to account for a single phenomenon. According to a mechanistic view of explanation, scientists explain a phenomenon by revealing how it works or how it came to be. If a phenomenon has one causal history or one set of parts, and a mechanistic explanation is a description of that history or those parts, then it seems natural to expect there to be a single correct explanation for a phenomenon. But, there are cases of explanatory pluralism in which biologists accept multiple mechanistic explanations.
In general, these sorts of concerns support a persistent implicit intuition that the unity of the world ought to lead to unity of explanation of parts of the world. In particular, Sandra Mitchell’s account of integrative pluralism addresses this tension by arguing that explanatory or theoretical pluralism makes sense when one is explaining idealized, abstract models which describe one or a few causal variables. In this case, there is a one to one relationship between an abstract model and a theory that applies to the model. Mitchell stresses that when one is explaining concrete phenomena, different accounts must be integrated into a single explanatory story because of the “realistic and concrete nature of explanation”.
In order to see the limitations of integrative pluralism and to allow for the multiple mechanistic explanations at more ‘concrete’ levels of analysis, it is important to attend to epistemological and pragmatic features of mechanistic explanations. How do researchers in different areas individuate the mechanisms that they study? What are the epistemological features of descriptions of mechanisms that make them explanatorily successful? How do we determine what makes both the explanation and what is being explained concrete or abstract? In this paper I concentrate on the last question. I argue that there is not a sharp distinction between concrete and abstract/ideal, in terms of explanandum phenomena or in terms of the nature of explanations, and as a result, Mitchell’s integration will apply to a limited class of cases and it may be operationally difficult to determine which cases demand integration.
Further, the concrete nature of phenomena does not secure the “concrete nature of explanation.” A mechanism is a thing or regularity in the world and a mechanistic explanation is a description of a mechanism. A thing can be correctly described in different ways. It is possible that useful descriptions of one aspect of a phenomenon can obscure other aspects of a phenomenon. The concrete nature, or unity, of a thing or process in the world should not lead us to expect that different descriptions can or should be integrated.