- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience
- Contributors
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience
- Introduction
- Molecules, Systems, and Behavior: Another View of Memory Consolidation
- Biological Clocks: Explaining with Models of Mechanisms
- Methodology and Reduction in the Behavioral Neurosciences: Object Exploration as a Case Study
- The Science of Research and the Search for Molecular Mechanisms of Cognitive Functions
- The Lower Bounds of Cognition: What Do Spinal Cords Reveal?
- Lessons for Cognitive Science from Neurogenomics
- Learning, Neuroscience, and the Return of Behaviorism
- fMRI: A Modern Cerebrascope? The Case of Pain
- The Embedded Neuron, the Enactive Field?
- The Role of Neurobiology in Differentiating the Senses
- Enactivism's Vision: Neurocognitive Basis or Neurocognitively Baseless?
- Space, Time, and Objects
- Neurocomputational Models: Theory, Application, Philosophical Consequences
- Neuroanatomy and Cosmology
- The Emerging Theory of Motivation
- Inference to the Best Decision
- Emergentism at the Crossroads of Philosophy, Neurotechnology, and the Enhancement Debate
- What's “Neu” in Neuroethics?
- Confabulations about People and Their Limbs, Present or Absent
- Delusional Experience
- The Case for Animal Emotions: Modeling Neuropsychiatric Disorders
- Levels, Individual Variation, and Massive Multiple Realization in Neurobiology
- Neuro‐Eudaimonics or Buddhists Lead Neuroscientists to the Seat of Happiness
- The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines the concept of mechanistic explanation by considering the mechanism of circadian rhythm or biological clocks. It provides an account of mechanistic explanation and some common failures of mechanistic explanation and discusses the sense in which mechanistic explanations typically span multiple levels. The article suggests that models that describe mechanisms are more useful for the purposes of manipulation and control than are scientific models that do not describe mechanisms. It comments on the criticism that the mechanistic explanation is far too simple to fully express the complexity of real explanations in neuroscience and that neuroscientific explanations require emergent properties that cannot be explained by decomposition into the parts, activities, and organizational features that constitute the mechanism.
Keywords: mechanistic explanation, circadian rhythm, biological clocks, scientific models, neuroscience, neuroscientific explanation
Sarah K. Robins is currently a senior graduate student in the Philosophy‐Neuroscience‐Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. She has published in both philosophy and psychology. She is co‐organizer of the Future Directions in Biology Series, a graduate student workshop in the philosophy of biology.
Carl F. Craver is Associate Professor in the Philosophy‐Neuroscience‐Psychology Program and the Department of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include the philosophy of neuroscience, scientific explanation, reduction and the unity of science, the history of electrophysiology, and the cognitive neuroscience of memory. He is the author of Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Science (Oxford University Press) and several articles in journals in history, philosophy, and neuroscience.
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- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience
- Contributors
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience
- Introduction
- Molecules, Systems, and Behavior: Another View of Memory Consolidation
- Biological Clocks: Explaining with Models of Mechanisms
- Methodology and Reduction in the Behavioral Neurosciences: Object Exploration as a Case Study
- The Science of Research and the Search for Molecular Mechanisms of Cognitive Functions
- The Lower Bounds of Cognition: What Do Spinal Cords Reveal?
- Lessons for Cognitive Science from Neurogenomics
- Learning, Neuroscience, and the Return of Behaviorism
- fMRI: A Modern Cerebrascope? The Case of Pain
- The Embedded Neuron, the Enactive Field?
- The Role of Neurobiology in Differentiating the Senses
- Enactivism's Vision: Neurocognitive Basis or Neurocognitively Baseless?
- Space, Time, and Objects
- Neurocomputational Models: Theory, Application, Philosophical Consequences
- Neuroanatomy and Cosmology
- The Emerging Theory of Motivation
- Inference to the Best Decision
- Emergentism at the Crossroads of Philosophy, Neurotechnology, and the Enhancement Debate
- What's “Neu” in Neuroethics?
- Confabulations about People and Their Limbs, Present or Absent
- Delusional Experience
- The Case for Animal Emotions: Modeling Neuropsychiatric Disorders
- Levels, Individual Variation, and Massive Multiple Realization in Neurobiology
- Neuro‐Eudaimonics or Buddhists Lead Neuroscientists to the Seat of Happiness
- The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity
- Index
