Explanation, Causation, and Evolution

Abstract

For the past three decades or so, the structure of scientific theories and their modes of explanation have received considerable attention from philosophers of science. The publication of Nagel’s The Structure of Science (1961) and Hempel’s Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965) has led most philosophers of science to address questions such as whether all sciences can be reduced to physics, what is a good scientific explanation, what is the function and scope of laws in scientific theories, and so on. And so it appeared just natural when, a couple of years later, thanks to ground-breaking works by Ruse (1973) and Hull (1974), the very same questions were raised in light of the specific challenges that biology and evolutionary theory posed to the “received view” of scientific theories. Are there laws in biology? Is biology doomed to become a chapter of physics? Or is it autonomous? What is the role of functional and teleological descriptions in biology and why don’t we find such things in physics? These were some of the questions debated at that time. Now, the first striking feature of Kenneth Schaffner’s recent book, Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine, is that it is primarily devoted to addressing most of these issues once again. Indeed, it seems to be Schaffner’s intention to revitalize the sort of problems which concerned philosophers of science thirty years ago, by giving them a new twist in light of recent approaches to these issues. In this respect, then, one cannot say that the subject matter of this book is newfangled. However, on a more innovative level, two interesting aspects of this book bear emphasis from the outset. First, its account of explanation and theory structure is supplemented with a focus on the context of discovery in the biomedical sciences. Second, against the general complaint that philosophers of biology have put too much emphasis on evolutionary theory, while neglecting disciplines such as immunology and