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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Philosophy of science
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The Explanatory Autonomy of the Biological Sciences (Hardcover)
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The Explanatory Autonomy of the Biological Sciences (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This book argues for the explanatory autonomy of the biological
sciences. It does so by showing that scientific explanations in the
biological sciences cannot be reduced to explanations in the
fundamental sciences such as physics and chemistry and by
demonstrating that biological explanations are advanced by models
rather than laws of nature. To maintain the explanatory autonomy of
the biological sciences, the author argues against explanatory
reductionism and shows that explanation in the biological sciences
can be achieved without reduction. Then, he demonstrates that the
biological sciences do not have laws of nature. Instead of laws, he
suggests that biological models usually do the explanatory work. To
understand how a biological model can explain phenomena in the
world, the author proposes an inferential account of model
explanation. The basic idea of this account is that, for a model to
be explanatory, it must answer two kinds of questions:
counterfactual-dependence questions that concern the model itself
and hypothetical questions that concern the relationship between
the model and its target system. The reason a biological model can
answer these two kinds of questions is due to the fact that a model
is a structure, and the holistic relationship between the model and
its target warrants the hypothetical inference from the model to
its target and thus helps to answer the second kind of question.
The Explanatory Autonomy of the Biological Sciences will be of
interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy
of science, philosophy of biology and metaphysics.
General
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