Leyes y modelos en la explicación biológica

• Luque, Víctor ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat de València

     Universitat de València

     Valencia, España

     
• Localización: Ludus vitalis: revista de filosofía de las ciencias de la vida = journal of philosophy of life sciences = revue de philosophie des sciences de la vie, ISSN 1133-5165, Vol. 22, Nº. 42, 2014, págs. 91-101
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • Laws and models in biological explanationFor years, the controversy over the existence of laws in biology has concerned and confronted philosophers and biologists. Even so, it could be said that biologists have been working without them during the last hundred and fifty years. They have using their time to developed (essentially mathematical) models to express biological facts. Thus, the challenge is to find out how models explain. Alisa Bokulich, in a recent paper called “How scientific models can explain”, analyzes three theoretical approximations to the explanatory capacity of scientific models (Carl Craver’s mechanistic model explanation; Mehmet Elgin and Elliott Sober’s covering-law model explanation, and Ernan McMullin’s causal model explanation) and proposes her own. We study such model, known as model explanation, and use the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium model as an example of what a biological law can be.