Explanation nomological

Perhaps the greatest source of interest which the philosopher of mind or the philosopher of social science may have in the philosophy of chemistry is simply to leam that, from a certain point of view, chemistry too can be considered a special science . And attendant upon this is the realization that what previously may have been considered a relatively uncontrover-sial case of ontological dependence raises the very same issues regarding reducibility, the autonomy of explanations (nomological and otherwise) at secondary levels, and the appropriateness of supervenience, that have long dogged many of the traditional debates within the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of social science. 

More fundamentally, reductionism as a thesis about inter-theoretical explanation was undermined by the eclipse of the Deductive-Nomological model. Once philosophers of science began to doubt whether deduction from laws was sufficient or necessary for explanation, the conclusion that inter-theoretical explanation need take the form of reduction was weakened. 

In Chapter 11 propose an account of explanation in the social sciences that, although less ambitious than nomological explanation, goes beyond mere narrative or description, however "thick." The central idea is that of a mechanism, a recurring and intelligible causal pattern. The emotional reactions, mental alchemies, and other forms of psychic causality that I discuss elsewhere in the book are instances of mechanisms in this sense. 

According to a classification going back to Coffa (1974) there are two major families of models of scientific explanation epistemic and ontic models. The representative of epistemic model is the Hempelian Deductive-Nomological, abbreviated DN-model and the main representative of ontic model is the causal model of explanation. I discuss each in the following. 

It is quite obvious that this could hardly be considered a scientific law. Thus, there is no way to describe the process of deriving output values as a nomic deduction or as an argument referring to a certain law or a number of laws. And this is exactly what the deductive nomological model of explanation requires. 

Hence the attempt to subsume molecular mechanics under the DN-model of scientific explanation fails. It fails twice First, the stun of the force-field potentials used in molecular mechanics calculations does not have the status of a proper scientific law and the derivation of the strain energy of a molecule by molecular mechanics is not nomological. Second, the conformational search required to find stable conformations is stochastic and not deductive. 

Unlike Kim, however, I do not think that the impossibility of either kind of functionalization entails that qualia are not physical properties. I think that if we were to find strict neuroscientific nomological correlates of qualia, then we would be justified in holding that qualia are identical with their neuroscientific correlates by an inference to the best explanation (McLaughlin, 2001, 2010, 2011). Kim (2005) has challenged the idea that identities can be inferred by inference to the best explanation for a response, see McLaughlin (2010, 2011). 

Two different, but interrelated systems of explanations exist in biology, which are (a) the dichotomy of N-DEs versus H-NEs, and (b) the dichotomy of functional explanations versus evolutionary explanations. The latter system stems from the division of biology into the major areas of functional and evolutionary biology (Mayr, 1982). These two systems of explanations in biology do not have a simple relationship to one another. All functional explanations are N-DEs and all H-NEs are evolutionary, but evolutionary explanations can be either N-DEs or H-NEs. Hence it is essential not only to characterize carefully the properties of N-DEs and H-NEs, but to show which parts of biology, and especially of evolutionary biology, are nomological-deductive and which are historical narrative. 

Nomological-Deductive Explanations (N-DEs) Historical-Narrative Explanations (H-NEs)... 

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