Does Functional Connectivity Explain?

Many successful explanations show how causally individuated parts are responsible for the occurrence of the phenomena that scientists seek to explain. On this view, parts that are chosen only by convention, and related only through correlations, cannot possibly figure in successful explanations. This is because without some form of causal grounding, it seems unintelligible why any explanatory relation between these parts and the phenomenon of interest would hold. This problem is particularly pronounced in functional connectivity models (FC) in neuroscience. These models typically represent time series of recurrent neural activity in conventionally determined spatial regions (as a network’s nodes) and synchronization likelihoods among these time series (as its edges). Many neuroscientists and philosophers maintain that because of this, FC models cannot provide explanations. We formulate this problem more precisely and then show that it rests on an impoverished interpretation of scientific models in general and FC models in particular. We then provide a positive account of how FC models provide a variety of neuroscientific explanations.