Bechtel William, Abrahamsen Adele
University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2005 Jun;36(2):421-41. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2005.03.010.
Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ diagrams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations are considerably richer than those suggested by a nomological framework. Second, the fact that mechanisms involve organized systems of component parts and operations provides direction to both the discovery and testing of mechanistic explanations. Finally, models of mechanisms are developed for specific exemplars and are not represented in terms of universally quantified statements. Generalization involves investigating both the similarity of new exemplars to those already studied and the variations between them.
生命科学中的解释通常涉及提出一个被认为是给定现象背后机制的模型。这类解释在许多方面不同于科学哲学中常见的规律性解释。本文重点关注三种差异。首先，构建机制性解释的科学家并不局限于语言表述和逻辑推理；他们经常使用图表来描述机制，并通过模拟对其进行推理。因此，呈现机制性解释的认知资源比规律性框架所暗示的要丰富得多。其次，机制涉及组成部分和操作的有组织系统这一事实，为机制性解释的发现和检验都提供了方向。最后，机制模型是针对特定范例构建的，并非用全称量化陈述来表示。概括涉及研究新范例与已研究范例的相似性以及它们之间的差异。
