Developmental explanation

Veli-Pekka Parkkinen

pp. 157-172

in: Dennis Dieks, Stephan Hartmann, Thomas Uebel, Marcel Weber, Maria C. Galavotti (eds), New directions in the philosophy of science, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Explaining development involves elaborating a causal process in which a system acquires new causal capacities over time, and subsequent developmental stages are produced as manifestation of these capacities. This presupposes an account of how these capacities are realized within the system, an explanation by appeal to constituents of the system. I employ a contrastive-counterfactual theory of explanation as well as the idea that explanations track manipulability-relations to describe the framework of developmental explanation as a combination of etiological and constitutive explanation. Then I turn to an examination of reductionism about developmental biology within this framework. I show that explaining a specific developmental capacity is a bottom-up explanation, following the constitutive dependence of system's capacity from its components. But to answer how an organism came to have a certain constitution at a certain stage, we must account for how the system's earlier capacities acted to produce the structures of interest. This requires reference to factors beyond the particular constituents of the system, such as interactions between the system and its environment. Whether a molecular, bottom-up explanation suffices to explain development depends on the specification of the explanation-seeking question.