This book develops a philosophical account that reveals the major
characteristics that make an explanation in the life sciences reductive
and distinguish them from non-reductive explanations. Understanding what
reductive explanations are enables one to assess the conditions under
which reductive explanations are adequate and thus enhances debates
about explanatory reductionism. The account of reductive explanation
presented in this book has three major characteristics. First, it
emerges from a critical reconstruction of the explanatory practice of
the life sciences itself. Second, the account is monistic since it
specifies one set of criteria that apply to explanations in the life
sciences in general. Finally, the account is ontic in that it traces the
reductivity of an explanation back to certain relations that exist
between objects in the world (such as part-whole relations and level
relations), rather than to the logical relations between sentences.
Beginning with a disclosure of the meta-philosophical assumptions that
underlie the author's analysis of reductive explanation, the book leads
into the debate about reduction(ism) in the philosophy of biology and
continues with a discussion on the two perspectives on explanatory
reduction that have been proposed in the philosophy of biology so far.
The author scrutinizes how the issue of reduction becomes entangled with
explanation and analyzes two concepts, the concept of a biological part
and the concept of a level of organization. The results of these five
chapters constitute the ground on which the author bases her final
chapter, developing her ontic account of reductive explanation.
