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93Makes a Difference: Review of Michael Strevens’ Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008Biology and Philosophy 26 (3): 459-467. 2011.Michael Strevens has produced an ambitious and comprehensive new account of scientific explanation. This review discusses its main themes, focusing on regularity explanation and a number of methodological concerns
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2373Three kinds of new mechanismBiology and Philosophy 28 (1): 99-114. 2013.I distinguish three theses associated with the new mechanistic philosophy – concerning causation, explanation and scientific methodology. Advocates of each thesis are identified and relationships among them are outlined. I then look at some recent work on natural selection and mechanisms. There, attention to different kinds of New Mechanism significantly affects of what is at stake.
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26Review of In Search of Mechanisms - Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden, In Search of Mechanisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2013), 256 pp., $75.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 82 (2): 321-325. 2015.
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158Explaining what? Review of explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience by Carl F. Craver (review)Biology and Philosophy 24 (1): 137-145. 2009.Carl Craver’s recent book offers an account of the explanatory and theoretical structure of neuroscience. It depicts it as centered around the idea of achieving mechanistic understanding, i.e., obtaining knowledge of how a set of underlying components interacts to produce a given function of the brain. Its core account of mechanistic explanation and relevance is causal-manipulationist in spirit, and offers substantial insight into casual explanation in brain science and the associated notion of …Read more
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199Causal Order and Kinds of RobustnessIn Snait Gissis, Ehud Lamm & Ayelet Shavit (eds.), Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences, Mit Press. pp. 269-280. 2017.This paper derives from a broader project dealing with the notion of causal order. I use this term to signify two kinds of parts-whole dependence: Orderly systems have rich, decomposable, internal structure; specifically, parts play differential roles, and interactions are primarily local. Disorderly systems, in contrast, have a homogeneous internal structure, such that differences among parts and organizational features are less important. Orderliness, I suggest, marks one key difference betwee…Read more
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57Marcello Barbieri (2003). The organic codes: An introduction to semantic biology (review)Acta Biotheoretica 52 (1): 65-69. 2004.
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47Engineering and Biology: Counsel for a Continued RelationshipBiological Theory 10 (1): 50-59. 2015.Biologists frequently draw on ideas and terminology from engineering. Evolutionary systems biology—with its circuits, switches, and signal processing—is no exception. In parallel with the frequent links drawn between biology and engineering, there is ongoing criticism against this cross-fertilization, using the argument that over-simplistic metaphors from engineering are likely to mislead us as engineering is fundamentally different from biology. In this article, we clarify and reconfigure the l…Read more
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