Abstract
This work addresses biological explanations and aims to provide a philosophical account which brings together logical-procedural and historical-processual aspects when considering molecular pathways. It is argued that, having molecular features as explananda, a particular non-classical logical language – Zsyntax – can be used to formally represent, in terms of logical theorems, types of molecular processes (pathways), and to grasp how we get from one molecular interaction to another, hence explaining why a given outcome occurs. Expressing types of molecular biology processes in terms of the Zsyntax language allows us to represent causal interactions by taking into account their context-sensitivity, and amounts to partly reviving the spirit of the so-called received view of explanation – which aimed to capture scientific explanatory accounts in terms of their logical structure and their appealing to nomological relations. Such a partial revival is pursued by invoking here non-classical deductions and empirical generalisations, which are called to provide the epistemic norms to explain the behavior of molecular pathways.
Highlights
As well-known, the philosophical debate on scientific explanation has gradually moved in a few decades from the initial search for a formal account which could apply to all explanations in all scientific fields, to an increasing stress on the peculiar aspects explanations could get in different scientific contexts.1 Emphasis has been put on different sorts of explananda, in particular on differences between explananda in physics and those in the other special sciences, and on how they might require to be explained on the basis of different explanatory accounts
Parallels and comparisons between explanations in biology and in history have already been elaborated in the literature (e.g. Kaiser et al, 2014), what we suggest hereinafter presents some original aspects insofar as it focuses on molecular biology, and brings together historicalprocessual and logical-procedural aspects of biological explanations in a novel way, by means of Zsyntax
TP53*U) and the proteasome (P); ii) the compound TP53*U is the result of the causal interaction, occurring at a time tf-2 < tf-1, between the compound realized by the protein MDM2 and TP53 and the protein U; iii) the compound MDM2*TP53 is the result of the causal interaction, occurring at a time tf-3 < tf-2, between the protein MDM2 and the protein TP53; iv) the compound MDM2 is the result of the causal interaction, occurring at a time tf-4 < tf-3, between the gene MDM2 and the protein TP53.8 At this point, that is, after having reconstructed the entire process starting from an initial time tf-4, we have the explanans of the degradation of TP53 occurring at a certain tf
Summary
As well-known, the philosophical debate on scientific explanation has gradually moved in a few decades from the initial search for a formal account which could apply to all explanations in all scientific fields, to an increasing stress on the peculiar aspects explanations could get in different scientific contexts. Emphasis has been put on different sorts of explananda, in particular on differences between explananda in physics and those in the other special sciences, and on how they might require to be explained on the basis of different explanatory accounts. Discussions have been largely pursued in the last decade or so on whether explanations are to be qualified as epistemic or ontic, and how exactly their epistemic and/or ontic features must be understood Such debates have significantly involved the biological sciences, and questioned what relations genuinely explain the occurrence of biological phenomena, given their peculiar features of being highly variable and dependent on the context in which they occur. On the one hand, revives the idea that a philosophical analysis of the structure of scientific explanation can satisfactorily capture molecular processes in logical terms, and, on the other hand, brings together some lessons we have learnt from the debate following the received view – some of those regarding historical explanations, the explanatory role of causal relations, and the need to account for the context-sensitivity of the phenomena under investigation.
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