How is biological explanation possible?

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (4):735-760 (2001)
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Abstract

That biology provides explanations is not open to doubt. But how it does so must be a vexed question for those who deny that biology embodies laws or other generalizations with the sort of explanatory force that the philosophy of science recognizes. The most common response to this problem has involved redefining law so that those grammatically general statements which biologists invoke in explanations can be counted as laws. But this terminological innovation cannot identify the source of biology's explanatory power. I argue that because biological science is historical, the problem of biological explanation can be assimilated to the parallel problem in the philosophy of history, and that the problem was solved by Carl Hempel. All we need to do is recognize that the only laws that biology—in all its compartments from the molecular onward—has or needs are the laws of natural selection.

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Alex Rosenberg
Duke University

Citations of this work

The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation.Carl F. Craver - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann, Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 27-52.
Fitness, probability and the principles of natural selection.Frederic Bouchard & Alexander Rosenberg - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (4):693-712.
A Theory of Non-universal Laws.Alexander Reutlinger - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (2):97 - 117.

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References found in this work

What is a Law of Nature?David Malet Armstrong - 1983 - Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Sydney Shoemaker.
Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science.Alexander Rosenberg - 1994 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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