Abduction and Composition

Kenneth Aizawa,Drew B Headley

doi:10.1017/psa.2021.22

Abstract

AbstractSome New Mechanists have proposed that claims of compositional relations are justified by combining the results of top-down and bottom-up interlevel interventions. But what do scientists do when they can perform, say, a cellular intervention, but not a subcellular detection? In such cases, paired interlevel interventions are unavailable. We propose that scientists use abduction and we illustrate its use through a case study of the ionic theory of resting and action potentials.

Highlights

The implicit assumption of the explanation is that the ion fluxes compose the action within what at least some New Mechanists take to be the purview of the New Mechanist approach
We find that pre-1952 work had established qualitatively the particular roles of sodium and potassium ions in the compositional basis of the resting and action potentials, whereas Hodgkin and Huxley’s papers of 1952 provided measurements of membrane currents that were consistent with those ions fluxing during the action potential, both confirming and refining the qualitative pre-1952 account
We have proposed that early Twentieth Century physiologists used abductive inferences to justify hypotheses about what composes what

Summary

Philosophical preliminaries on abduction and interlevel experiments

We have proposed that early Twentieth Century physiologists used abductive inferences to justify hypotheses about what composes what. Given such an observation, one philosophical project would be to develop a theory of what abductive inferences are. In the case of the action potential, the total ionic current could be measured, but the fluxes of individual ions were not observed, since early Twentieth Century physiologists did not have the technology to isolate them This second feature of abduction serves to distinguish it from so-called “interlevel experiments” in the way mentioned in the introduction. 13 In principle, one might claim that there are “interlevel experiments” wherein scientists in one lab perform an experiment on one level, whereas scientists in another lab perform an limited so that one cannot directly detect at the lower level In such cases, top-down interlevel experiments will be technologically impossible, but one might be able to justify hypotheses through abductive inferences. There are, many philosophical issues we have not touched on, but we shall return to some of them in the concluding remarks

The pre-1952 Understanding of the Resting and Action Potentials

Conclusion

Findings

Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36