I also discuss non-empirical investigations of models that I call robustness and sensitivity analyses. Although it is invariance rather than stability of generalizations that furnishes us with explanatory generalizations, there is an important function that stability has in this context of explanations, namely, stability furnishes us with extrapolability and reliability of scientific explanations. The more stable a generalization, the less dependent it is on background conditions to remain true. Stability deals with a generality that has to do with holding of a generalization in possible background conditions. A generalization can be invariant and explanatory regardless of its lawlike status. Whether a generalization remains invariant during its interventions is the criterion that determines whether it is explanatory. An invariant generalization continues to hold or be valid under a special change called an intervention that changes the value of its variables. I will claim that there are generalizable and reliable causal explanations in ecology by generalizations, which are invariant and stable. I investigate and analyze such properties of generalizations as lawlikeness, invariance, and stability, and I ask which of these properties are relevant in the context of scientific explanations. The question at issue in this dissertation is the epistemic role played by ecological generalizations and models. This suggest that there might be nothing special about the biological sciences vis-à-vis the more fundamental natural sciences, such as physics insofar as explanations of exceptions are concerned, and that the biological sciences can provide reliable and extrapolatable results or explanations by themselves. I also discuss and refute more general arguments why the idea of lower-level explanations of exceptions has been held to hold in the special sciences, such as the screening-off and openness arguments. I present counterexamples to the idea of lower-level explanations of exceptions in biology. The idea of lower-level explanations of exceptions is connected to the idea that the biological sciences need lower-level sciences to better themselves and to the idea that biological sciences cannot provide reliable and extrapolatable results or explanations by themselves. I will discuss the traditional and still almost universally held idea that the biological sciences cannot deal with exceptions and application conditions of their generalizations with their own distinctive and proprietary explanantia, but need the help of lower-level sciences to carry out this task. This special status of biology is used as a premise in arguments that posit a deprived explanatory, nomological, or methodological status in the biological sciences. It is often argued that biological generalizations have a distinctive and special status by comparison with the generalizations of other natural sciences, such as that biological generalizations are riddled with exceptions defying systematic and simple treatment. Key words: evolutionary contingency thesis generative entrenchment laws multiple realization Finally, I discuss the possibility of evolution producing repeatable and general non-lawlike regularities and patterns by utilizing the notion of generative entrenchment and by criticizing the thesis of multiple realizability of biological properties. Fourth, I develop a counterexample to Beatty’s thesis. Third, I argue that Beatty and his commentators have focused on the more ineffective trajectory stability version of the argument, whereas the constancy stability version provides a more substantial and applicable argument against the existence of biological laws. Second, Beatty’s two different versions of strong contingency are analyzed in terms of two different stabilities of regularities. First, I argue that in Beatty’s thesis there are two versions of strong contingency used as arguments against biological laws that have gone unnoticed by his commentators. The best argument for the contingency of biological regularities is John Beatty’s evolutionary contingency thesis, which will be re-analyzed here. The contingency of biological regularities – and its implications for the existence of biological laws – has long puzzled biologists and philosophers.
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