Biological Theory’s June issue, 21(2), is a thematic collection titled “Continually Discovering Complexity: Essays in Honor of William Bechtel”, edited by Daniel C. Burnston.

William Bechtel and Daniel C. Burnston set the stage with their Introduction to the Special Issue, introducing the notions of “mechanism” and “mechanistic explanation” and providing an overview of the essays in this volume that apply and expand on Bechtel’s work.

Hanna Lucia Worliczek, Karl S. Matlin, and Sara Green’s “Illuminating Cells: Mechanistic Heuristics in the Age of Fluorescence Microscopy” and Bollhagen’s “Creativity and Practical Underdetermination: How Experimental Science Steps into the Epistemic Adjacent Possible” examine how mechanistic explanations are integrated with new forms of models and experimental strategies.

Daniel C. Burnston’s “The Bechtel Approach to the Scope and Limits of Mechanistic Explanation” focuses on models and discusses Bechtel’s “integrative” pluralism, in which distinct models contribute distinct resources to explaining a single system or phenomenon.

Arnon Levy, in his article “The Pragmatic Approach to Explanation Revamped and Remotivated”, asks what explanations are and outlines a pragmatic approach to answering this question.

Leonardo Bich and Laura Menatti’s “Homeostasis and Health: From Balance to Change” discusses the role of homeostasis and argues that characterizing an organism in terms of set points is misleading, as organisms continuously change and live in changing environments.

Jason Winning’s article “Open-Ended Control Versus Closed-Ended Control: Limits of Mechanistic Explanation” and Jennifer Mundale’s “Multiple Realizability: Still Something After All These Years” address traditional challenges to mechanistic explanation.

The June issue concludes with a Classics in Biological Theory article by Auguste Nahas on “Revisiting Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943)”.