Carl F. Craver (2007), Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press — DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299317.001.0001
Key takeaways
Registered from secondary description, not read. What follows comes from Crossref’s chapter list and from reviews of the book.
- Explanation is of mechanisms. The book asks what distinguishes good explanations in neuroscience from bad, and answers, descriptively and normatively, that good ones describe mechanisms. Chapters: “Explanation and Causal Relevance”, “Causal Relevance and Manipulation”, “The Norms of Mechanistic Explanation”, “A Field-Guide to Levels”, “Nonfundamental Explanation”, “The Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience”.
- Two kinds of relevance. Causal relevance, between events, is given a manipulationist account. Constitutive relevance, between a mechanism’s behaviour and its components, is a part–whole relation: a component is relevant when it is part of the mechanism and the two are mutually manipulable, so that intervening on either changes the other. The criterion has been much criticised since.
- Levels of mechanisms and the mosaic. Levels are levels of mechanisms nested in mechanisms. Neuroscience is unified not by reduction but as a mosaic: fields and techniques each constrain a shared mechanism, and independent methods triangulate on it. The worked cases are the Hodgkin–Huxley model of the action potential and the link between long-term potentiation and memory.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-07 at the owner’s request. The owner’s essay “The Organization of Will” cites it for the difference between constitutive and causal relevance, and for mechanistic explanation.
Deferred because nobody here has read it. The entry is written from
metadata and reviews, not from the book.