Discovering Complexity by William Bechtel

Discovering Complexity by William Bechtel

Discovering Complexity offers an account of scientific discovery that aims to be psychologically and historically realistic. Drawing on cases from a number of life sciences, including biochemistry, genetics, and neuroscience, this study of the dynamics of theory development focuses on two psychological heuristics, decomposition and localization. William Bechtel and Robert Richardson identify a number of "choice-points" that scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and describe how different choices result in divergent explanatory models. According to Bechtel and Richardson's analysis, decomposition is the attempt to differentiate components of a system, while localization assigns responsibility for specific tasks to these components. The book examines in detail the usefulness of these heuristics in biological science, but also discusses their fallibility: underlying their use is the sometimes false assumption that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchical. When a system does not appear to be decomposable, a classic response has been to abandon the pursuit of mechanistic explanation and to settle for accurate descriptions of phenomena. More recently, with advances in mathematical modeling, an alternative has emerged. Described in this work is an approach to explanation that appeals to interactions between simple components, rather than assigning functions to individual components.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691087627
ISBN 10	0691087628
Title	Discovering Complexity
Author	William Bechtel
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	1993-01-03
Number of pages	308
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable