What Functions Explain: Functional Explanation and Self-Reproducing Systems (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology) - Hardcover

McLaughlin, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521782333 ISBN 13: 9780521782333

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2000

Synopsis

This book offers an examination of functional explanation as it is used in biology and the social sciences, and focuses on the kinds of philosophical presuppositions that such explanations carry with them. McLaughlin gives a critical review of the debate on functional explanation in the philosophy of science that has occurred over the past fifty years. He discusses the history of the philosophical question of teleology, and provides a comprehensive review of the postwar literature on functional explanation. The book provides a sophisticated and detailed Aristotelian analysis of our concept of natural functions, and offers a positive contribution to the ongoing debate on the topic.

About this title

Book Description

This book offers an examination of functional explanation as it is used in biology and the social sciences, and focuses on the kinds of philosophical presuppositions that such explanations carry with them. It tackles such questions as: Why are some things explained functionally while others are not? What do the functional explanations tell us about how these objects are conceptualized? What do we commit ourselves to when we give and take functional explanations in the life sciences and the social sciences?

Review

'McLaughlin has given us an original and daring account of functional explanation ... [his] fascinating account of organisms as self-maintaining systems is important ...' Acta Biotheoretica

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521782333
• ISBN 13: 9780521782333
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272