Models, theory structure and mechanism in biochemistry: The case of allosterism

KARINA ALLEVA; JOSE ANTONIO DIEZ; LUCIA FEDERICO

San Pablo

Congreso; 2017 Meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB); 2017

International Society for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB)

In the last years, it has been argued that explanatory causal mechanisms in some special sciences such as biochemistry and molecular biology cannot be captured by any useful notion of theory, or at least by any standard notion in the market. Two aspects criticized are the notion of theory as a helpful conceptual tool to account for relevant features of scientific practice in biological fields, and the existence and use of laws in relevant explanatory practice. The goal of this presentation is to show that formal analysis may be useful to discuss andseed light on substantive meta-theoretical issues. We proceed here by exemplification, analysing and reconstructing as a case study a paradigmatic biochemical theory, Monod-Wyman-Changeux (MWC) theory of allosterism, and applying the reconstruction to the discussion of some issues raised by prominent representatives of the new mechanist philosophy. In this presentation we show that: i) a model-theoretic notion of theory, and in particular the structuralist notion of theory-net already applied to other unified explanatory theories, adequately suits the MWC allosteric mechanism explanatory set-up, ii) that the unified aspects of MWC explanations cannot be accounted for merely in a mechanistic terms and are well explicated by the notion of theory-net; and iii) that the notion of law, in the weak sense of non-accidental ‒ and possibly domain specific ‒ generalization, is essential for allosteric explanations. The conclusion is that particular elements of traditional approaches are not contradictory to but rather complementary with new mechanist philosophy, and together offer a more complete understanding of special sciences and the variety of explanations they provide.