Reductive Explanation in the Biological Sciences

This volume develops a philosophical account that reveals that the major characteristics that make an explanation in the life sciences reductive. The main theme it addresses is defining characteristics common among reductive explanations in the life sciences allowing one to clearly distinguish reductive from non-reductive explanations. Understanding what reductive explanations are enables one to assess the conditions under which reductive explanations are adequate and under which they are inadequate 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 author's account is general (or monistic) since it provides only one answer to reductive explanation that holds for all of the life sciences. Finally, the account is ontic in that it traces the reductivity of an explanation back to certain relations that exist between certain objects in the world, rather than to the logical relations between sentences. These relations in the world that determine the reductivity of an explanation are part-whole relations and level-relations.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 part (and of a part-whole relation) 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.