The terms “perspectivism” and “perspectivalism” have been the focus of an intense philosophical discussion with important repercussions for the debate about the role of mechanisms in scientific explanations. However, leading exponents of the new mechanistic philosophy have conceded more than was necessary to the radically subjectivistic perspectivalism, and fell into the opposite error, by retaining not negligible residues of objectivistic views about mechanisms. In order to remove this vacillation between the subjective-cultural and the objective-natural sides of mechanisms, we shall raise (...) the question about theory-ladenness over again and interpret it in its connection with the technical–experimental nature of scientific knowledge, as affirming the perspectival character of scientific knowledge: It is because of the character at once theory-laden and practice-laden, i.e. technique-laden, of our putting questions to nature that empirical reality must be investigated from particular perspectives: nature can be known scientifically only from a potentially infinite number of perspectives or theoretical points of view, concretely exemplified by mechanisms or experimental ‘machines’ that allow specific access to specific aspects of sensible reality. (shrink)

Evidence-Based Medicine has little consideration for mechanisms and philosophers of science and medicine have recently made pleas to increase the place of mechanisms in the medical evidence hierarchy. However, in this debate the notions of mechanisms seem to be limited to 'mechanistic processes' and 'complex-systems mechanisms,' understood as 'componential causal systems'. I believe that this will not do full justice to how mechanisms are used in biological, psychological and social sciences and, consequently, in a more biopsychosocial approach to medicine. Here, (...) I propose, following (Kuorikoski, 2009), to pay more attention to 'abstract forms of interaction' mechanisms. The present work scrutinized review articles on depression and medically unexplained pain, which are considered to be of multifactorial pathogenesis, for their use of mechanisms. In review articles on these disorders there seemed to be a range of uses between more 'abstract forms of interaction' and 'componential causal system' mechanisms. I therefore propose to expand the notions of mechanisms considered in medicine to include that of more 'abstract forms of interaction' to better explain and manage biopsychosocial disorders. (shrink)

The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers of science, many of whom have (...) assimilated their conception of explanation to the ontic conception. (shrink)

The traditional practice of establishing morphological types and investigating morphological organization has found new support from evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), especially with respect to the notion of body plans. Despite recurring claims that typology is at odds with evolutionary thinking, evo-devo offers mechanistic explanations of the evolutionary origin, transformation, and evolvability of morphological organization. In parallel, philosophers have developed non-essentialist conceptions of natural kinds that permit kinds to exhibit variation and undergo change. This not only facilitates a construal of species (...) and higher taxa as natural kinds, but also broadens our perspective on the diversity of kinds found in biology. There are many different natural kinds relevant to the investigative and explanatory aims of evo-devo, including homologues and developmental modules. (shrink)

Evo-devo is a multidisciplinary field that investigates the interplay between evolutionary and developmental processes and brings together different kinds of explanatory strategies. This chapter examines the structure of paradigmatic explanations in evo-devo (e.g., the explanation of the origin of an evolutionary novelty) and raises philosophical questions about explanation in evo-devo. Much research in evo-devo is concerned with studying the developmental mechanisms that constrain and facilitate phenotypic evolution, which suggests that a distinctive feature of evo-devo is that it constructs mechanistic explanations. (...) In this chapter, I discuss three major challenges for thinking about evo-devo as providing mechanistic explanations. First, an explanation of an evolutionary novelty consists of several mechanistic explanations, rather than being a single one. Second, developmental mechanisms are ontogenetically and phylogenetically dynamic and thus difficult to individuate. Third, an explanation of an evolutionary novelty also has a non-mechanistic, historical part. Finally, I discuss whether evo-devo’s emphasis on mechanistic explanation promotes explanatory integration or results in a reductionist view of evolution. (shrink)

This paper critiques the new mechanistic explanatory program on grounds that, even when applied to the kinds of examples that it was originally designed to treat, it does not distinguish correct explanations from those that blunder. First, I offer a systematization of the explanatory account, one according to which explanations are mechanistic models that satisfy three desiderata: they must 1) represent causal relations, 2) describe the proper parts, and 3) depict the system at the right ‘level.’ Second, I argue that (...) even the most developed attempts to fulfill these desiderata fall short by failing to appropriately constrain explanatorily apt mechanistic models. -/- *This paper used to be called "The Emperor's New Mechanisms". (shrink)

Unified, all-purpose, philosophical models of reduction in science lack resources for capturing varieties of cross-scientific relations that have proven critical to understanding some scientific achievements. Not only do those models obscure the distinction between successional and cross-scientific relations, their preoccupations with the structures of both theories and things provide no means for accommodating the contributions to various sciences of theories and research about long-term diachronic processes involving large-scale, distributed systems. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the parade case. (...) Explanatory pluralism accommodates a wider range of connections between theories and inquiries in science than all-purpose models of reduction do. Consequently, it provides analytical tools for understanding the roles of the theoretical proposals about the evolution of the human mind/brain that have proliferated over the last two decades. Those proposals have testable implications pertaining to both structure and processing in the modern human mind/brain. An example of such research illustrates how those proposals and investigative tools and experiments cut across both explanatory levels and modes of analysis within the cognitive sciences and how those studies can yield evidence that bears on the assessment of competing theories and models. (shrink)

Se critican dos tesis de Nancy Cartwright. Por un lado, se examina el enfoque de las “capacidades” en el campo de lo económico para argumentar que estas responden a la lógica de los “árboles de posibilidades” o resultados de final abierto; por el otro, se ofrece una alternativa al problema de “sobre-restricción” de los modelos económicos para mostrar cómo el gran número de supuestos auxiliares acota las posibilidades de extrapolar las conclusiones obtenidas en el modelo a condiciones distintas de las (...) explicitadas en él. Se muestra la utilidad del análisis de robustez para descubrir las condiciones esenciales que cierran el árbol de posibilidades. (shrink)

RESUMEN Se critican dos tesis de Nancy Cartwright. Por un lado, se examina el enfoque de las "capacidades" en el campo de lo económico para argumentar que estas responden a la lógica de los "árboles de posibilidades" o resultados de final abierto; por el otro, se ofrece una alternativa al problema de "sobre-restricción" de los modelos económicos para mostrar cómo el gran número de supuestos auxiliares acota las posibilidades de extrapolar las conclusiones obtenidas en el modelo a condiciones distintas de (...) las explicitadas en él. Se muestra la utilidad del análisis de robustez para descubrir las condiciones esenciales que cierran el árbol de posibilidades. ABSTRACT The article criticizes two of Nancy Cartwright's theses. On the one hand, it examines the capabilities approach in the field of economics in order to argue that those capabilities function according to the logic of probability trees or open-ended results. On the other hand, it proposes an alternative to the problem of "over-restriction" of economic models, in order to show that the great number of auxiliary assumptions limits the possibilities of extrapolating the conclusions drawn from the model to conditions other than those it takes into account. The article shows the utility of robustness analysis in order to discover the essential conditions that surround the tree of probabilities. (shrink)

The history of developmental biology is interwoven with debates as to whether mechanistic explanations of development are possible or whether alternative explanatory principles or even vital forces need to be assumed. In particular, the demonstrated ability of embryonic cells to tune their developmental fate precisely to their relative position and the overall size of the embryo was once thought to be inexplicable in mechanistic terms. Taking a causal perspective, this Element examines to what extent and how developmental biology, having turned (...) molecular about four decades ago, has been able to meet the vitalist challenge. It focuses not only on the nature of explanations but also on the usefulness of causal knowledge – including the knowledge of classical experimental embryology – for further scientific discovery. It also shows how this causal perspective allows us to understand the nature and significance of some key concepts, including organizer, signal and morphogen. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.

This paper proposes an experiment-based methodology for both classical genetics and molecular biology by integrating Lindley Darden’s mechanism-centered approach and C. Kenneth Waters’s phenomenon-centered approach. We argue that the methodology basing on experiments offers a satisfactory account of the development of the two biological disciplines. The methodology considers discovery of new mechanisms, investigation of new phenomena, and construction of new theories together, in which experiments play a central role. Experimentation connects the three type of conduct, which work as both ends (...) and means, occurring in a circular way and constituting an overall process of scientific practice from classical genetics to molecular biology. (shrink)

The scope of this paper can be clarified by means of a well-known phenomenon that is usually called ‘industrial melanism’: the fact that the melanic form of the peppered moth became dominant in industrial areas in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such changes in relative phenotype frequencies are important explananda for population biologists. Apart from trying to explain such changes over time, population biologists also often try to explain differences between populations, e.g. why yellow shell colour (...) is dominant in certain colonies of land snails and almost absent in other colonies. The causal explanations that are given to address such explananda are the objects of analysis in this paper. Our primary aim is to explicate their structure: we want to capture the typical ingredients of causal explanations in population biology, and their organisation. Based on this explication, we discuss how natural selection fits into recent mechanical philosophy of science, and engage in the debate on the nature of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

In this paper I address the current debate on ontic versus epistemic conceptualizations of mechanistic explanation in the mechanisms literature. Illari recently argued that good explanations are subject to both ontic and epistemic constraints: they must describe mechanisms in the world in such fashion that they provide understanding of their workings. Elaborating upon Illari’s ‘integration’ account, I argue that causal role function discovery of mechanisms and their components is an epistemic prerequisite for achieving these two aims. This analysis extends Illari’s (...) account in important ways, putting more pressure on ontic readings of mechanistic explanation and providing an answer to the question how ontic and epistemic constraints on mechanistic explanation are related. I argue these point in terms of cases on memory research drawn from neuroscience and research on extinct neurogenetic mechanisms from early nervous systems biology. (shrink)

Many people who claim that evolution and theism are in tension assume that God, being omnipotent, could create life in different ways. For instance, Paul Draper has argued that the fact that life evolved on earth supports naturalism over theism. However, for there to be a probabilistic tension between naturalism and theism, because of the fact of evolution, a certain background assumption must be true, namely, that God could have made biological organisms and species through an act of Genesis-style special (...) creation, or some combination of evolution and special creation. But that background assumption is potentially faulty. Why? Because special creation presupposes that biological organisms and species are spatiotemporally unrestricted entities, and if the dominant paradigm in biology, and philosophy of biology, on the ontological status of organisms and species is correct, then they are spatiotemporally restricted entities. (shrink)

In this paper I apply the mechanistic account of explanation to engineering science. I discuss two ways in which this extension offers further development of the mechanistic view. First, functional individuation of mechanisms in engineering science proceeds by means of two distinct sub types of role function, behavior function and effect function, rather than role function simpliciter. Second, it offers refined assessment of the explanatory power of mechanistic explanations. It is argued that in the context of malfunction explanations of technical (...) systems, two key desiderata for mechanistic explanations, ‘completeness and specificity’ and ‘abstraction’, pull in opposite directions. I elaborate a novel explanatory desideratum to accommodate this explanatory context, dubbed ‘local specificity and global abstraction’, and further argue that it also holds for mechanistic explanations of malfunctions in the biological domain. The overall result is empirically-informed understanding of mechanistic explanation in engineering science, thus contributing to the ongoing project of understanding mechanistic explanation in novel or relatively unexplored domains. I illustrate these claims in terms of reverse engineering and malfunction explanations in engineering science. (shrink)

We examine the use of the notion of natural selection in the philosophical debate on functions in biology. This debate has been largely shaped by the way in which different accounts assess various selective pressures in justifying claims about biological functions. Cummins (Functions: new essays in the philosophy of psychology and biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 157–172, 2002), one of the main proponents of the causal role account of biological functions, argues that a correctly understood neo-Darwinian notion of natural (...) selection has nothing to do with functional talk in biology. In this paper, we counter Cummins’ account by showing that progress in the molecular approaches to evolutionary biology—specifically scientific data available in neo-functionalization research—offers valuable support to the etiological selectionist approach to functions in biological and biologically-related sciences. Finally, we use the presented data to build our own account of biological functions, which tries to avoid the wrong turns taken by both major strands in the biological function debate, namely causal role and etiological accounts. According to our account, the function of a certain gene or a protein in the biological system that contains it is a particular causal activity, or a group of causal activities whose manifestation is in a specific way determined by corresponding mechanisms of genetic expression. Also, we argue that in many important cases this particular expression of genetic activity was positively selected at a certain point in evolutionary history. Since we take selection as an important but not the only factor that grounds biological functions, we are committed to a weak etiological account. (shrink)

In this paper, I critique two conceptions of mechanisms, namely those put forth by Stuart Glennan (Erkenntnis 44:49–71, 1996; Philosophy of Science 69:S342–S353, 2002) and Machamer et al. (Philosophy of Science 67:1–25, 2000). Glennan’s conception, I argue, cannot account for mechanisms involving negative causation because of its interactionist posture. MDC’s view encounters the same problem due to its reificatory conception of activities—this conception, I argue, entails an onerous commitment to ontological dualism. In the place of Glennan and MDC, I propose (...) a “modified conception” of mechanisms, which (a) obviates the problem of negative causation by reinterpreting MDC’s activities according to a “descriptivist” account, and (b) avoids MDC’s problem by postulating a monistic ontology of entities. Thus, by solving these problems, my modified conception offers a cogent, more adequate alternative to Glennan’s and MDC’s conceptions of mechanisms. (shrink)

Mechanisms consist of component parts and processes organized in a specific way to produce changes that may give rise to one or more phenomena. I aim to examine the generative mechanism of generative material models in the production of new material models. A generative material model in biology is a living material model that is capable of generating new material models. I contend that generative mechanisms of a generative material model are not to be conflated with biological mechanisms: the former (...) is a mechanism manipulated and altered by the modeler while the latter is a naturally occurring mechanism. I examine the ways in which idealization may contribute to the generative mechanism in generating new model organisms. I articulate that the component parts and activities in a generative mechanism are to a large extent shaped by idealization in generative material modeling. Although biological mechanisms do have a role to play in the generation of model organisms, I propose that we shall view the generative mechanism as a hybrid of biological mechanisms and modeling activities. I shall argue that the notion of generative mechanisms as hybrid mechanisms is different from the extant conceptions of mechanisms in various aspects. (shrink)

Philosophers have long been interested in a series of interrelated questions about natural kinds. What are they? What role do they play in science and metaphysics? How do they contribute to our epistemic projects? What categories count as natural kinds? And so on. Owing, perhaps, to different starting points and emphases, we now have at hand a variety of conceptions of natural kinds—some apparently better suited than others to accommodate a particular sort of inquiry. Even if coherent, this situation isn’t (...) ideal. My goal in this article is to begin to articulate a more general account of ‘natural kind phenomena’. While I do not claim that this account should satisfy everyone—it is built around a certain conception of the epistemic role of kinds and has an obvious pragmatic flavour—I believe that it has the resources to go further than extant alternatives, in particular the homeostatic property cluster view of kinds. (shrink)

According to mainstream philosophical views causal explanation in biology and neuroscience is mechanistic. As the term ‘mechanism’ gets regular use in these fields it is unsurprising that philosophers consider it important to scientific explanation. What is surprising is that they consider it the only causal term of importance. This paper provides an analysis of a new causal concept—it examines the cascade concept in science and the causal structure it refers to. I argue that this concept is importantly different from the (...) notion of mechanism and that this difference matters for our understanding of causation and explanation in science. (shrink)

Mechanistic accounts of explanation have recently found popularity within philosophy of science. Presently, we introduce the idea of an extended mechanistic explanation, which makes explicit room for the role of environment in explanation. After delineating Craver and Bechtel’s account, we argue this suggestion is not sufficiently robust when we take seriously the mechanistic environment and modeling practices involved in studying contemporary complex biological systems. Our goal is to extend the already profitable mechanistic picture by pointing out the importance of the (...) mechanistic environment. It is our belief that extended mechanistic explanations, or mechanisms that take into consideration the temporal sequencing of the interplay between the mechanism and the environment, allow for mechanistic explanations regarding a broader group of scientific phenomena. (shrink)

Evolutionary explanations are not only common in the biological sciences, but also widespread outside biology. But an account of how evolutionary explanations perform their explanatory work is still lacking. This paper develops such an account. I argue that available accounts of explanations in evolutionary science miss important parts of the role of history in evolutionary explanations. I argue that the historical part of evolutionary science should be taken as having genuine explanatory force, and that it provides how‐possibly explanations sensu Dray. (...) I propose an account of evolutionary explanations as comparative‐composite explanations consisting of two distinct kinds of explanations, one processual and one historical, that are connected via the explanandum's evolvability to show how the explanandum is the product of its evolutionary past. The account is both a reconstruction of how evolutionary explanations in biology work and a guideline specifying what kind of explanations evolutionary research programs should develop. (shrink)

This paper explores how work in the philosophy of science can be used when teaching scientific content to science students and when training future science teachers. I examine the debate on the concept of fitness in biology and in the philosophy of biology to show how conceptual pluralism constitutes a problem for the conceptual change model, and how philosophical work on conceptual clarification can be used to address that problem. The case of fitness exemplifies how the philosophy of science offers (...) tools to resolve teaching difficulties and make the teaching of scientific concepts more adequate to the actual state of affairs in science. (shrink)

Natural kinds are often contrasted with other kinds of scientific kinds, especially functional kinds, because of a presumed categorical difference in explanatory value: supposedly, natural kinds can ground explanations, while other kinds of kinds cannot. I argue against this view of natural kinds by examining a particular type of explanation—mechanistic explanation—and showing that functional kinds do the same work there as traditionally recognized natural kinds are supposed to do in “standard” scientific explanations. Breaking down this categorical distinction between traditional natural (...) kinds and other kinds of kinds, I argue, delivers two goods: It provides us with a view of natural kindhood that does justice to the epistemic roles of kinds in scientific explanations. And it allows us to solve a problem that HPC theory, currently one of the more popular accounts of natural kindhood, confronts. (shrink)

James Woodward offers a conception of explanation and mechanism in terms of interventionist counterfactuals. Based on a case from ecology, I show that ecologists’ approach to that case satisfies Woodward’s conditions for explanation and mechanism, but his conception does not fully capture what ecologists view as explanatory. The new mechanistic philosophy likewise aims to describe central aspects of mechanisms, but I show that it is not sufficient to account for ecological mechanisms. I argue that in ecology explanation involves identification of (...) invariant and insensitive causal relationships and descriptions of the mechanistic characteristics that make these relations possible. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, OH 45469‐1546; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question whether a mechanistic approach can account for evolutionary causes. The last decade has seen a major attempt to account for natural selection as a mechanism. Nevertheless, we stress the relevance of broadening the debate by including the other evolutionary causes inside the mechanistic approach, in order to be a legitimate conceptual framework on the same footing as other approaches to evolutionary theory. We analyse the current debate on natural selection as a mechanism, and (...) extend it to the rest of the evolutionary causes. We focus on three approaches that we call the stochastic view, the functional view, and the minimalist view. We argue that all of them are unable to account for evolutionary causes as mechanisms. It is concluded that the current mechanistic proposals cannot be accepted as a common framework for evolutionary causes. Finally, we outline some guidelines and requirements that any mechanistic proposal should meet in order to be applied to evolutionary theory. (shrink)

It's widely supposed that unification is an epistemic virtue: the degree to which a theory is unified contributes to its overall confirmation. However, this supposition has consequences which haven't been noted, and which undermine the leading accounts of unification. For, given Hempel's equivalence condition, any epistemic virtue must be such that logically equivalent theories must equally well unify any body of evidence, and logically equivalent bodies of evidence must be equally well unified by any theory. Yet the leading accounts of (...) unification in Bayesian terms, or those in terms of argument patterns, cannot satisfy these constraints conditions. The reason for this runs deep: these accounts of unification make unity depend on factors that vary between equivalent theories: the probabilistic relations of their components, or their relations to argument patterns. The solution is to abandon such accounts and instead adopt an account of unity based on worldly relations such as causation, rather than inferential relations. Such an account effortlessly satisfies the equivalence conditions, and so may describe the epistemic virtue of unity. (shrink)

The concept of mechanism in biology has three distinct meanings. It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology (‘mechanicism’), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure (‘machine mechanism’), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon (‘causal mechanism’). In this paper I trace the conceptual evolution of ‘mechanism’ in the history of biology, and I examine how the three meanings of this term have come to be featured in the philosophy of biology, (...) situating the new ‘mechanismic program’ in this context. I argue that the leading advocates of the mechanismic program (i.e., Craver, Darden, Bechtel, etc.) inadvertently conflate the different senses of ‘mechanism’. Specifically, they all inappropriately endow causal mechanisms with the ontic status of machine mechanisms, and this invariably results in problematic accounts of the role played by mechanism-talk in scientific practice. I suggest that for effective analyses of the concept of mechanism, causal mechanisms need to be distinguished from machine mechanisms, and the new mechanismic program in the philosophy of biology needs to be demarcated from the traditional concerns of mechanistic biology. (shrink)

In a well-cited book chapter, ecologist Jared Diamond characterizes three main types of experiment performed in community ecology: laboratory experiment, field experiment, and natural experiment. Diamond argues that each form of experiment has strengths and weaknesses, with respect to, for example, realism or the ability to follow a causal trajectory. But does Diamond’s typology exhaust the available kinds of cause-finding practices? Some social scientists have characterized something they call “causal process tracing.” Is this a fourth type of experiment or something (...) else? I examine Diamond’s typology and causal process tracing in the context of a case study concerning the dynamics of wolf and deer populations on the Kaibab Plateau in the 1920s, a case that has been used as a canonical example of a trophic cascade by ecologists but which has also been subject to controversy. I argue that ecologists have profitably deployed causal process tracing together with other types of experiment to help settle questions of causality in this case. It remains to be seen how widespread the use of causal process tracing outside of the social sciences is (or could be), but there are some potentially promising applications, particularly with respect to questions about specific causal sequences. (shrink)

In addition to theorizing about the role and value of mechanisms in scientific explanation or the causal structure of the world, there is a fundamental task of getting straight what a ‘mechanism’ is in the first place. Broadly, this paper is about the challenge of application: the challenge of aligning one's philosophical account of a scientific concept with the manner in which that concept is actually used in scientific practice. This paper considers a case study of the challenge of application (...) as it pertains to the concept of a mechanism: the debate about whether natural selection is a mechanism. By making clear what is and is not at stake in this debate, this paper considers various strategies for dealing with the challenge of application and makes a case for definitional pluralism about mechanism concepts. (shrink)

This paper is about mechanisms and models, and how they interact. In part, it is a response to recent discussion in philosophy of biology regarding whether natural selection is a mechanism. We suggest that this debate is indicative of a more general problem that occurs when scientists produce mechanistic models of populations and their behaviour. We can make sense of claims that there are mechanisms that drive population-level phenomena such as macroeconomics, natural selection, ecology, and epidemiology. But talk of mechanisms (...) and mechanistic explanation evokes objects with well-defined and localisable parts which interact in discrete ways, while models of populations include parts and interactions that are neither local nor discrete in any actual populations. This apparent tension can be resolved by carefully distinguishing between the properties of a model and those of the system it represents. To this end, we provide an analysis that recognises the flexible relationship between a mechanistic model and its target system. In turn, this reveals a surprising feature of mechanistic representation and explanation: it can occur even when there is a mismatch between the mechanism of the model and that of its target. Our analysis reframes the debate, providing an alternative way to interpret scientists’ mechanism-talk , which initially motivated the issue. We suggest that the relevant question is not whether any population-level phenomenon such as natural selection is a mechanism, but whether it can be usefully modelled as though it were a particular type of mechanism. (shrink)

It is argued that once biological systems reach a certain level of complexity, mechanistic explanations provide an inadequate account of many relevant phenomena. In this article, I evaluate such claims with respect to a representative programme in systems biological research: the study of regulatory networks within single-celled organisms. I argue that these networks are amenable to mechanistic philosophy without need to appeal to some alternate form of explanation. In particular, I claim that we can understand the mathematical modelling techniques of (...) systems biologists as part of a broader practice of constructing and evaluating mechanism schemas. This argument is elaborated by considering the case of bacterial chemotactic networks, where some research has been interpreted as explaining phenomena by means of abstract design principles. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce the notion of horizon for scientific practice (HSP), representing limits or boundaries within which scientists ply their trade, to facilitate analysis of scientific discovery and progress. The notion includes not only constraints that delimit scientific practice, e.g. of bringing experimentation to a temporary conclusion, but also possibilities that open up scientific practice to additional scientific discovery and to further scientific progress. Importantly, it represents scientific practice as a dynamic and developmental integration of activities to investigate (...) and analyze the natural world. I use the discovery of the clotting factor, thrombin, and the experiments conducted by the Johns Hopkins physiologist, William Howell, on the enzymatic nature of thrombin to illustrate the notion of HSP. In a concluding section, I compare the notion of HSP to other notions for scientific practice proposed in the history and philosophy of science literature. (shrink)

I distinguish three theses associated with the new mechanistic philosophy – concerning causation, explanation and scientific methodology. Advocates of each thesis are identified and relationships among them are outlined. I then look at some recent work on natural selection and mechanisms. There, attention to different kinds of New Mechanism significantly affects of what is at stake.

Although there has been much recent discussion on mechanisms in philosophy of science and social theory, no shared understanding of the crucial concept itself has emerged. In this paper, a distinction between two core concepts of mechanism is made on the basis that the concepts correspond to two different research strategies: the concept of mechanism as a componential causal system is associated with the heuristic of functional decomposition and spatial localization and the concept of mechanism as an abstract form of (...) interaction is associated with the strategy of abstraction and simple models. The causal facts assumed and the theoretical consequences entailed by an explanation with a given mechanism differ according to which concept of mechanism is in use. Research strategies associated with mechanism concepts also involve characteristic biases that should be taken into account when using them, especially in new areas of application. (shrink)

We argue that dynamical and mathematical models in systems and cognitive neuro- science explain (rather than redescribe) a phenomenon only if there is a plausible mapping between elements in the model and elements in the mechanism for the phe- nomenon. We demonstrate how this model-to-mechanism-mapping constraint, when satisfied, endows a model with explanatory force with respect to the phenomenon to be explained. Several paradigmatic models including the Haken-Kelso-Bunz model of bimanual coordination and the difference-of-Gaussians model of visual receptive fields are (...) explored. (shrink)

In Search Of Mechanisms is a book about the methodology of biology. It is a work by Carl Craver and Lindley Darden, both of whom are well-known individually for their advocacy of mechanistic explanation—in the neurosciences and in the fields of genetics, cytology and molecular biology . Here, the two join forces to give a unified model of biological explanation, not limited to a particular area of biological enquiry, as rooted in the search for mechanisms.The objectives of the book are (...) threefold. First, it sets out to describe what biologists do. This first objective can be described as the goal of making biology more comprehensible. If biology involves the search for mechanisms, then one cannot understand the history of biology and its current practice without understanding mechanisms. Secondly, the book seeks to give a proscriptive account of explanation and the process of explaining some phenomena. This second objective relates to an interest in contributing to the .. (shrink)

The central aim of this article is to specify the ontological nature of constitutive mechanistic phenomena. After identifying three criteria of adequacy that any plausible approach to constitutive mechanistic phenomena must satisfy, we present four different suggestions, found in the mechanistic literature, of what mechanistic phenomena might be. We argue that none of these suggestions meets the criteria of adequacy. According to our analysis, constitutive mechanistic phenomena are best understood as what we will call ‘object-involving occurrents’. Furthermore, on the basis (...) of this notion, we will clarify what distinguishes constitutive mechanistic explanations from etiological ones. 1 Introduction 2 Criteria of Adequacy 2.1 Descriptive adequacy 2.2 Constitutive–etiological distinction 2.3 Constitution 3 The Ontological Nature of Constitutive Mechanistic Phenomena 3.1 Phenomena as input–output relations 3.2 Phenomena as end states 3.3 Phenomena as dispositions 3.4 Phenomena as behaviours 4 Phenomena as Object-Involving Occurrents 4.1 What object-involving occurrents are and why we need them 4.2 The object in the phenomenon 4.3 The adequacy of option 5 Conclusion. (shrink)

La filosofía estándar de la economía presupone que en el dominio de los fenómenos económicos subyacen regularidades estables, las cuales pueden explicarse mediante el funcionamiento de mecanismos o de máquinas socioeconómicas. Asimismo, se considera que una vez puestos en funcionamiento, su comportamiento no necesita de subsecuentes intervenciones. Esto implica asumir que los procesos socioeconómicos tienen una naturaleza semejante a los de las ciencias naturales. No obstante, dichas regularidades son por lo general examinadas a la luz de algún modelo económico, por (...) lo cual pierden muchas veces contacto con el mundo real. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo poner en el centro del análisis otro objeto de estudio: los procesos económicos basados en expectativas. Se trata de procesos en los cuales la acción humana funciona como nexo causal entre las variables económicas y en los que dicha acción es producto de una formación previa de expectativas, las cuales son sensibles a la información del contexto. Se mostrará que en esta clase de procesos la intervención sistemática sobre las condiciones de fondo y sobre las expectativas es fundamental si lo que se busca es alcanzar un objetivo deseado o lograr un proceso estable. Esta intervención requerirá no solo del conocimiento proporcionado por los modelos, sino también de un conocimiento extrateorético o interdisciplinario. Mainstream philosophy of economics assumes that steady regularities underlie the domain of economic phenomena which can be explained by the operation of mechanisms or socioeconomic machines. It is also considered that once operating those mechanisms don't need further interventions. This implies the assumption that the nature of socioeconomic processes is similar to the one of the natural sciences. Nevertheless, such regularities are usually examined in the light of some economic model, which often ends up losing contact with the real world. The present paper aims at putting in the center of the analysis another object of study: the economic processes based on expectations. In these processes the human action operates as a causal link between economic variables; such an action being the result of a previous building of expectations which are sensitive to the information of the context. It will be shown that the systematic intervention on the background conditions and expectations is fundamental in this kind of processes if what is sought is fulfilling a desired goal or managing a stable process. That intervention will not only require the knowledge provided by models but also an extra-theoretical or interdisciplinary knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine what is to be said in defence of Machamer, Darden and Craver’s (MDC) controversial dualism about activities and entities (Machamer, Darden and Craver’s in Philos Sci 67:1–25, 2000). We explain why we believe the notion of an activity to be a novel, valuable one, and set about clearing away some initial objections that can lead to its being brushed aside unexamined. We argue that substantive debate about ontology can only be effective when desiderata for an (...) ontology are explicitly articulated. We distinguish three such desiderata. The first is a more permissive descriptive ontology of science, the second a more reductive ontology prioritising understanding, and the third a more reductive ontology prioritising minimalism. We compare MDC’s entities-activities ontology to its closest rival, the entities-capacities ontology, and argue that the entities-activities ontology does better on all three desiderata. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare the mechanisms of protein synthesis and natural selection. We identify three core elements of mechanistic explanation: functional individuation, hierarchical nestedness or decomposition, and organization. These are now well understood elements of mechanistic explanation in fields such as protein synthesis, and widely accepted in the mechanisms literature. But Skipper and Millstein have argued that natural selection is neither decomposable nor organized. This would mean that much of the current mechanisms literature does not apply to the mechanism (...) of natural selection.We take each element of mechanistic explanation in turn. Having appreciated the importance of functional individuation, we show how decomposition and organization should be better understood in these terms. We thereby show that mechanistic explanation by protein synthesis and natural selection are more closely analogous than they appear—both possess all three of these core elements of a mechanism widely recognized in the mechanisms literature. (shrink)

Besides mechanistic explanations of phenomena, which have been seriously investigated in the last decade, biology and ecology also include explanations that pinpoint specific mathematical properties as explanatory of the explanandum under focus. Among these structural explanations, one finds topological explanations, and recent science pervasively relies on them. This reliance is especially due to the necessity to model large sets of data with no practical possibility to track the proper activities of all the numerous entities. The paper first defines topological explanations (...) and then explains why topological explanations and mechanisms are different in principle. Then it shows that they are pervasive both in the study of networks—whose importance has been increasingly acknowledged at each level of the biological hierarchy—and in contexts where the notion of selective neutrality is crucial; this allows me to capture the difference between mechanisms and topological explanations in terms of practical modelling practices. The rest of the paper investigates how in practice mechanisms and topologies are combined. They may be articulated in theoretical structures and explanatory strategies, first through a relation of constraint, second in interlevel theories, or they may condition each other. Finally, I explore how a particular model can integrate mechanistic informations, by focusing on the recent practice of merging networks in ecology and its consequences upon multiscale modelling. (shrink)

Skipper and Millstein analyze natural selection and mechanism, concluding that natural selection is not a mechanism in the sense of the new mechanistic philosophy. Barros disagrees and provides his own account of natural selection as a mechanism. This discussion identifies a missing piece of Barros's account, attempts to fill in that piece, and reconsiders the revised account. Two principal objections are developed: one, the account does not characterize natural selection; two, the account is not mechanistic. Extensive and persistent variability causes (...) both of these difficulties, so further attempts to describe natural selection as a mechanism are also unlikely to succeed. (shrink)