Functional Analyses, Mechanistic Explanations and Explanatory Tradeoffs
Recently, Piccinini and Craver have stated three theses concerning the relations between functional analysis and mechanistic explanation in cognitive sciences: No Distinctness: functional analysis and mechanistic explanation are explanations of the same kind; Integration: functional analysis is a ki...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2013 |
| País: | Argentina |
| Institución: | Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas |
| Repositorio: | CONICET Digital (CONICET) |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/3690 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/11336/3690 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Functional Analysis Mechanistic Explanation Model Explanation Generality https://purl.org/becyt/ford/6.3 https://purl.org/becyt/ford/6 |
| Sumario: | Recently, Piccinini and Craver have stated three theses concerning the relations between functional analysis and mechanistic explanation in cognitive sciences: No Distinctness: functional analysis and mechanistic explanation are explanations of the same kind; Integration: functional analysis is a kind of mechanistic explanation; and Subordination: functional analyses are unsatisfactory sketches of mechanisms. In this paper, I argue, first, that functional analysis and mechanistic explanations are sub-kinds of explanation by scientific (idealized) models. From that point of view, we must take into account the tradeoff between the representational/explanatory goals of generality and precision that govern the practice of model-building. In some modeling scenarios, it is rational to maximize explanatory generality at the expense of mechanistic precision. This tradeoff allows me to put forward a problem for the mechanist position. If mechanistic modeling endorses generality as a valuable goal, then Subordination should be rejected. If mechanists reject generality as a goal, then Integration is false. I suggest that mechanists should accept that functional analysis can offer acceptable explanations of cognitive phenomena. |
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