Mechanistic Explanation: The Joint Account

Abstract

After stem cell phenomena are characterized, scientists seek to explain them in terms of underlying molecular mechanisms. This style of explanation, which compiles results of many experiments, is widespread in biology and medicine. Mechanistic explanations describe the parts and processes underlying phenomena, such as DNA synthesis, cell metabolism, memory, and stem cell capacities, differentiation, and self-renewal. Philosophical accounts of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation largely concur on their essential features. There is less consensus, however, on what makes a mechanistic description explanatory. Scientific explanation is traditionally associated with ‘covering laws’ that subsume many diverse phenomena. But laws of this sort appear rarely, if ever, in mechanistic explanations of biological phenomena. More promising is the idea that mechanistic descriptions explain in virtue of correspondence to real causal relations among working components of a mechanism. However, despite its plausibility and rigorous explication by a new theory, this causal account is not fully satisfactory either. This chapter builds on earlier philosophical work to propose a new account of mechanistic explanation, centered on the concept of jointness.