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Essay on The Philosophy of Science
"Reading the Book of Nature" by Peter Kosso claims that philosopher of science to write with systematic deliberateness on the topic of scientific explanation was Aristotle (about 320 B.C.E.). It was Aristotle's view that explanation in science unveils the essence or being (the ousia in Attic Greek) of the phenomenon explained. Put in a slightly different way, he held that explanation in science requires correct "definition" of the phenomenon explained. This was unfortunate for two reasons. First, it entangled science too extensively with speculative metaphysics. (Kosso, Peter 1992) The scientist was required not merely to give an adequate accounting of how we happen to experience the phenomenon being explained--to "save the phenomenon," as the saying goes--but rather the scientist was required to expose the "essential being" of the phenomenon.
Second, the Aristotelian model of scientific explanation mixed explanation up with the arbitrary conventions of language insofar as it treated explanation as a matter of how we classify things using a collection of conventional categories, or worse, of how we arbitrarily choose to define words. But what is explained is something in the real world of experience--an event, an object, or a property that occurs, exists, or is exemplified--not a word or expression in a language.
According to Peter Kosso, yet only linguistic entities like words or expressions can have definitions. In chapter 4 we were introduced to an interesting type of immune cell called a natural killer (NK) cell whose main function is to identify and destroy cells of the host organism that have become transformed through cancer or viral invasion. Now I do not explain to you why nor how NK cells kill cancer cells by defining the expression 'NK cell'. On the other hand, if I do explain to you why and how NK cells kill cancer cells...............
