Many philosophers have explored the extensive use of non-universal generalizations in different sciences for inductive and explanatory purposes, analyzing properties such as how widely a generalization holds in space and time. In the present paper, we concentrate on developmental biology to distinguish and characterize two common approaches to scientific generalization—mechanism generalization and principle generalization. The former approach seeks detailed descriptions of causal relationships among specific types of biological entities that produce a characteristic phenomenon across some range of different biological entities; the latter approach abstractly describes relations or interactions that occur during ontogeny and are exemplified in a wide variety of different biological entities. These two approaches to generalization correspond to different investigative aims. Our analysis shows why each approach is sought in a research context, thereby accounting for how practices of inquiry are structured. It also diagnoses problematic assumptions in prior discussions, such as abstraction always being correlated positively with generalizations of wide scope.

许多哲学家已经探索了非普遍泛化在不同科学中的广泛使用，用于归纳和解释目的，分析了泛化在空间和时间中的适用范围等特性。在本文中，我们专注于发育生物学，以区分和表征两种常见的科学泛化方法——机制泛化和原理泛化。前一种方法寻求对特定类型的生物实体之间的因果关系的详细描述，这些生物实体在一定范围的不同生物实体中产生特征现象;后一种方法抽象地描述了个体发育过程中发生的关系或相互作用，并在各种不同的生物实体中得到了例证。这两种泛化方法对应于不同的调查目标。我们的分析显示了为什么在研究背景下寻求每种方法，从而解释了探究实践的结构。它还诊断了先前讨论中有问题的假设，例如抽象总是与广泛范围的概括呈正相关。