Abstract
It is often argued that biological generalizations have a distinctive and special status by comparison with the generalizations of other natural sciences, such as that biological generalizations are riddled with exceptions defying systematic and simple treatment. This special status of biology is used as a premise in arguments that posit a deprived explanatory, nomological, or methodological status in the biological sciences. I will discuss the traditional and still almost universally held idea that the biological sciences cannot deal with exceptions and application conditions of their generalizations with their own distinctive and proprietary explanantia, but need the help of lower-level sciences to carry out this task. The idea of lower-level explanations of exceptions is connected to the idea that the biological sciences need lower-level sciences to better themselves and to the idea that biological sciences cannot provide reliable and extrapolatable results or explanations by themselves. I present counterexamples to the idea of lower-level explanations of exceptions in biology. I also discuss and refute more general arguments why the idea of lower-level explanations of exceptions has been held to hold in the special sciences, such as the screening-off and openness arguments. This suggest that there might be nothing special about the biological sciences vis-à-vis the more fundamental natural sciences, such as physics insofar as explanations of exceptions are concerned, and that the biological sciences can provide reliable and extrapolatable results or explanations by themselves.
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Notes
If the reader is suspicious of level talk and/or the idea that the sciences can be neatly organized into lower- and higher-levels, there is a way to express my arguments without these ideas. In that case, paraphrase the basic idea of my paper as follows: biological sciences can explain away their exceptions as apparent exceptions by using distinctively or proprietary biological explanantia and without the need to resort in this task to the explanatia of other - putatively more basic, fundamental, or mature - sciences. Thus, the biological sciences are much more autonomous in explaining away their exceptions than the traditional and nearly universally accepted idea of corrective asymmetry suggests to us.
Lumping Wimsatt under the heading of (mechanistic) reductionism might be strained, although he has defended a mechanistic account of explanation: Wimsatt perceives reductionism and antireductionism as complementary heuristics. The point is that Wimsatt has given an argument, presented next, to which a reductionist or a defender of a mechanistic account of explanation could appeal when claiming that the explanations of exceptions should be lower-level rather than same-level.
Several antireductionist philosophers have defended the autonomous explanatory status of the explanantia in the special sciences (Fodor 1974; Putnam 1975; Kitcher 1984; Weslake 2010; Haug 2011). In contrast to the account of explanatory power just presented, these accounts are one-dimensional, referring to the greater generality or abstractness of the explanantia in the special sciences as the dimension conferring the explanantia a high explanatory power. There are issues in the one-dimensional accounts. First, as shown by Clarke (2016), the idea of abstractness as an explanatory virtue has relied on a vague or unanalyzed concept. When the concept is analyzed, abstractness is shown to be a conflated concept: Clarke shows that there are four different and independent senses of abstractness as a potential explanatory virtue. Second, in the arguments, the premise for the greater generality or abstractness of the explanantia in the special sciences is often the (radical) multiple realization thesis of the special sciences properties or predicates, which has recently been criticized on various grounds (Bechtel and Mundale 1999; Batterman 2000; Shapiro 2000; Raerinne and Eronen 2012). This implies that the explanantia in the special sciences might lack the dimension that the one-dimensional accounts attribute to them. The multi-dimensional account of explanatory power presented above does not solely or at least mainly depend on the truth of the multiple realizability thesis, when attributing a high explanatory power to higher level explanantia. Nor does it solely rely on (a vague or conflated concept of) abstractness as an explanatory virtue. Moreover, the multi-dimensional account of explanatory power not only can accommodate the idea of the one-dimensional accounts via, for instance, unification, but the one-dimensional accounts lack the flexibility and diversity of the multi-dimensional account. Intuitively, there seems to be more than one dimension to explanatory power, and the multi-dimensional account explicates this idea. The multi-dimensional account is applicable to cases where the special sciences’ explanantia lack generality or abstractness, but have other merits vis-à-vis explanatory power, such as stability and cognitive salience. Thus, the multi-dimensional account of explanatory power is not only descriptively, conceptually, and normatively superior to the one-dimensional accounts, but it is also on a firmer ground. Finally, the multi-dimensional account can also be used to explicate the idea that lower-level (mechanistic) explanations are “deeper” than higher-level ones, via, for instance, factual accuracy or precision. The account is thus biased neither towards reductionism nor antireductionism but can be used to analyze explanatory virtues and vices of both kinds of explanations.
As I have argued elsewhere (ms. under review), it is debatable whether factual accuracy can be claimed to be an explanatory virtue, when evaluating explanations of different heuristics, such as holism and reductionism. Rather, it seems to be an explanatory virtue of explanations within a heuristic. For the present purposes, not much depends on this issue.
The presented argument is probably not the argument that Davidson (1970) had in mind. Davidson presented a version of the openness argument applying to the mental only (see Shagrir (2011) for different interpretations of the openness of the mental attributable to Davidson). The putative distinctive nature of the mental sensu Davidson is not the topic of the current paper.
My way of characterizing generalizations as universally quantified statements in which the ceteris paribus clause is attached to the antecedent, \( \forall x((\hbox {cp } \& \hbox { Fx}) \rightarrow \hbox { Gx})\), was not meant to subscribe to any specific account of ceteris paribus laws. Rather, I framed the idea as simply as possible to make certain points about explanations of exceptions, different kinds of exceptions to the generalizations, and so on. There are other, more sophisticated, ways to include ceteris paribus clauses in statements of laws besides placing them in the antecedents. At the same time, the problems of the ceteris paribus law account are often, but not always, independent of the various formal ways used to express or include ceteris paribus clauses in law statements. For instance, as was pointed out by a referee, my way of characterizing generalizations could be open to the criticism, advanced by Elgin and Sober (2002), that a statement of a ceteris paribus law and its contraposition give contradictory suggestions whether the law applies. Now, if the original statement and its contraposition are logically equivalent, then something has gone wrong, because the statement and its contraposition cannot be false and true at the same time. There might be ways to avoid difficulties such as these in the context of ceteris paribus clauses, e.g., by utilizing some default logic; and there has been discussion whether contraposition is valid for ceteris paribus generalizations. I am not going to discuss these here. Because I agree with the referee that the ceteris paribus account of laws is riddled with semantic, epistemic, and empirical difficulties. However, I am not suggesting that the competitive exclusion principle is a ceteris paribus law. The author has argued elsewhere that the principle is a strict, empirical, and distinctively biological law, which might be universally true (Raerinne 2015; Raerinne and Baedke 2015). The proviso clause of the competitive exclusion principle can be eliminated by a known and finite list of factors or by conditions capable of producing apparent exceptions to the competitive exclusion principle. Thus, the competitive exclusion principle is a strict law in disguise, because its proviso clause is not empirically vacuous, open-ended, or semantically inaccurate ceteris paribus clause, but a clause that can be strictly complemented. Moreover, it is not my argument, as was Cartwright ’s (1983), who was the target of Elgin and Sober (2002), that fundamental laws do not apply to the real world, because their ceteris paribus clauses describe so idealized conditions that are never true of the real world. The competitive exclusion principle applies to many real systems; and conditions under which it is expected to hold can be stated exactly and in a way that the principle is empirically testable. Thus, even if the contraposition argument applied to the way I framed generalizations, it does not apply to the competitive exclusion principle, because its proviso clause is not false tout court. Finally and related to the points just discussed, my discussion of same-level explanations of exceptions could be interpreted to vindicate the ceteris paribus account of laws, as was suggested by another referee. From the point of view of lower-level explanations of exceptions, generalizations in the special sciences appear to be riddled with exceptions that we cannot explain as apparent exceptions by a finite list of explanantia. Hence the need of ceteris paribus clauses. However, when the same exceptions are explained by means of same-level explanantia, it seems that the laws can be strictly complemented, because there are no infinite lists of interfering conditions to the laws, but finite lists of explanations to the exceptions that can be spelled out in detail. That is, the ceteris paribus strategy to save the laws from exceptions is an illusion created by the idea of corrective asymmetry in the special sciences! Again, the competitive exclusion principle provides a good example of how a law that appears to be interfered with a myriad of unknown background conditions producing exceptions to the law, can be strictly complemented by means of a finite list of same-level explanations to exceptions (see discussion of ‘constitutive and interfering coexistence explanantia’ and ‘environmental heterogeneity’ below, and Raerinne and Baedke (2015) in which the above is argued for in length). For the present purposes, the strict or ceteris paribus lawlike nature of the competitive exclusion principle is irrelevant.
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Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Pekka Mäkelä, Michiru Nagatsu, Caterina Marchionni, Marion Godman, Luis Flores, Harold Kincaid, Samuli Pöyhönen, Tomi Kokkonen, Jan Baedke, Alkistis Elliott-Graves, Tero Ijäs, Stefan Feidl, Rami Koskinen, Petri Turunen, Ilkka Pättiniemi, Miles MacLeod, and two referees for this journal, who provided critical and constructive comments on previous drafts of the paper. This research has been supported by the Academy of Finland, Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
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Raerinne, J. Explanations of exceptions in biology: corrective asymmetry versus autonomy. Synthese 194, 5073–5092 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1195-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1195-9