Seminario di Dipartimento (SeRiC): "How to make sense of mechanical explanations?"

Partecipanti: Sophie Roux -Professeure d'Histoire et philosophie des sciences, ENS de Paris

"How to make sense of mechanical explanations?

It is well-known that Descartes gave mechanical explanations of all kinds of phenomena, whether it be gravity, magnetism, the colors of the rainbow, the circulation of the blood, the motion of the heart. These explanations are not true: as far as we know, there are no such things as a subtle matter circulating around the Earth, as corkscrew-shaped particles or as particles of the second element. But the fact that they are trivially false does not mean that they were necessarily bad explanations. The gist of this paper is to ask whether the notion of mechanism that was recently developed in philosophy of biology could help us to make sense of these explanations, that is to understand their epistemological value."