Explicaciones, mecanismos y reacciones químicas

Resumen

In this paper we propose an enhanced notion of mechanistic explanation that is in accordance with chemical practice. From the necessity of understanding practices of explanatory inquiry in organic chemistry from a dynamic point of view in which intervention and contrafactual experimental settings are emphasized, a non-nomological-deductive mechanistic explanation view is presented. Not sufficiently emphasizing the explanatory and dynamic features has led some philosophers of chemistry to doubt about this view’s validity in this field of science. In this article we claim that a well articulated consideration of those features in the mechanistic explanation view may both strengthen this model and correctly account for the explanatory activities in the case of the study of organic chemical reactions.