Teorías, mecanismos y explicación en bioquímica: el caso del alosterismo

KARINA ALLEVA; JOSE ANTONIO DIEZ; LUCIA FEDERICO

Barcelona

Congreso; IX Congreso Internacional de Metateoría Estructuralista; 2014

Facultat de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona

From the new mechanicist philosophy it has been argued that explanatory causal mechanisms in biochemistry cannot be captured by any useful notion of theory, or at least by any standard notion in the market. The goal of this paper is threefold. First, we argue that a model-theoretic notion of theory, and in particular the structuralist notion of theory-net already applied to other unified explanatory theories, suites perfectly MWC allosteric mechanism explanatory set-up. Second, also contra some mechanicist claims, we argue that so reconstructed the theory essentially contains non-accidental regularities that qualify as laws. Third, we discus the relationship between mechanistic and functional explanations concluding that functional, and partially mechanistically partially incomplete, explanations are not defective in any relevant sense.