Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Despite the importance of network analysis in biological practice, dominant accounts of scientific explanation do not account satisfactorily for how this family of explanations gain their explanatory power in every specific application. This deficiency is particularly salient in the study of the ecology of the microbiome, as explained by Coyte et al., and of other ecological phenomena. In the present work we show (i) that neither causalist (including new mechanistic), nor unificationist or other recent non-causalist, accounts can provide satisfactory elucidations explicate these ecological  explanations; and (ii) that they may be adequately elucidated within a general analytical framework of scientific explanation as ampliative, specialized embedding (ASE) in a theory-net, which has recently been successfully applied to other biological subfields. We use ASE to reconstruct in detail the Coyte et al case study and on its basis, we claim that network explanations of the ecology of the microbiome, and other similar explanations in ecology, gain their epistemological force in virtue of their capacity to embed biological phenomena in a non-accidental generalization that is simultaneously ampliative and specialized.