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Reductive Explanation in the Biological Sciences

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This book develops a philosophical account that reveals the major characteristics that make an explanation in the life sciences reductive and distinguish them from non-reductive explanations. Understanding what reductive explanations are enables one to assess the conditions under which reductive explanations are adequate and thus enhances debates about explanatory reductionism. The account of reductive explanation presented in this book has three major characteristics. First, it emerges from a critical reconstruction of the explanatory practice of the life sciences itself. Second, the account is monistic since it specifies one set of criteria that apply to explanations in the life sciences in general. Finally, the account is ontic in that it traces the reductivity of an explanation back to certain relations that exist between objects in the world (such as part-whole relations and level relations), rather than to the logical relations between sentences. Beginning with a disclosure of the meta-philosophical assumptions that underlie the author’s analysis of reductive explanation, the book leads into the debate about reduction(ism) in the philosophy of biology and continues with a discussion on the two perspectives on explanatory reduction that have been proposed in the philosophy of biology so far. The author scrutinizes how the issue of reduction becomes entangled with explanation and analyzes two concepts, the concept of a biological part and the concept of a level of organization. The results of these five chapters constitute the ground on which the author bases her final chapter, developing her ontic account of reductive explanation.

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Detail Information

Series Title

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

Call Number

101

Publisher

Cham, Switzerland : Springer Cham., 2015

Collation

XI, 277

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978-3-319-25310-7

Classification

101

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

1

Subject(s)

Philosophy of Science

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Marie I. Kaiser

Other Information

Cataloger

Firli

Source

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-25310-7

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