Dear all,

We will have our next LIRa session tomorrow, on Thursday, 7 October 16:30.

Please use our recurring zoom link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/88142993494?pwd=d1BsQWR4T2UyK0Job29YNThjaGRkUT09 (Meeting ID: 881 4299 3494, Passcode: 352984)

You can find the details of the talk below.

Speaker: Dingmar van Eck (University of Amsterdam, Ghent University)

Date and Time: Thursday, October 7th 2021, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam time.

Venue: online.

Title:  Mechanist Idealisation in Systems Biology

Abstract.

This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for countering heat shock—the heat shock response (HSR) system—in Escherichia coli (E.coli) bacteria. This research also reinforces a more general lesson: ontic constraint accounts in the literature on mechanistic explanation provide insufficiently informative normative appraisals of mechanistic models. We close by outlining an alternative view on the explanatory norms governing mechanistic representation.

Hope to see you there!

The LIRa team