In this commentary, I have defended the claim that the current tools of mechanistic explanation are sufficient for accommodating the explanatory goals in current neuroscience, particularly in the special case of direction selectivity in the retina and other neural systems. A closer look at explanatory practice shows that, in representative cases of empirical research, models of direction selectivity have to take a number of components in a distributed network into account in order to provide a full-fledged description of the relevant processes. On the philosophical side, the conceptual tools of “reconstituting the phenomena” (Bechtel & Richardson 1993) and “top-down causation” (Craver & Bechtel 2007), offered by existing models of mechanistic explanation, might be sufficient for capturing the problematic cases to which Anderson (this collection) points.
On the other hand, Anderson’s proposal (this collection) to extend existing models of mechanistic explanation with the notion of enabling constraints is very interesting and might offer an avenue to more nuanced mechanistic descriptions of systems in their contextual embedding. In almost all relevant cases in neuroscience research, there are various external factors influencing the workings of a system, and it is often difficult to draw clear boundaries between vital and non-vital, but nevertheless highly influential system components. Anderson’s framework would offer a viable solution for handling those modulatory constraints. Resolving this debate will also depend on a clear conception of how the entities that display a certain phenomenon are best identified and described.