Una propuesta de explicación científica a partir del giro práctico en epistemología, la explicación por mecanismos

Abstract

In the philosophy of biology, an area of growing interest is that of mechanism-based models of models of explanation by mechanisms. A paper considered among the most important and most cited is that of Machamer, Darden and Craver, "Thinking about mechanisms" from 2000 (Machamer et al., 2000). This proposal of explanation by mechanisms is, in part, a consequence of the "practical" turn (Iglesias, 2004; MDC 2000, 2) and, in part, a development of the different versions of functional analysis that have been tried in philosophy of science since the middle of the 20th century, mostly devoted to the study of various processes (generally physico-chemical) in the life sciences (Craver, 2001, 54). From this perspective, some authors consider that, at least for the life sciences, a satisfactory explanation consists in the description of the mechanism that accounts for the occurrence of a phenomenon (Machamer, et al., 2002, 2; Craver, 2001, 62; Nicholson, 2012, 157-158). However, as Nicholson (2012, 159) points out, this explanatory model, while useful when it comes to a description of how a given activity of a system is carried out by necessarily alluding to the peculiar organization of its components and the role it plays in another system that contains it in turn, is not able to justify how the organized character of the system itself is generated and preserved, processes that, following Maturana and Varela (1994, 79), could be called "autopoietic processes".