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)

The philosophical conception of mechanistic explanation is grounded on a limited number of canonical examples. These examples provide an overly narrow view of contemporary scientific practice, because they do not reflect the extent to which the heuristic strategies and descriptive practices that contribute to mechanistic explanation have evolved beyond the well-known methods of decomposition, localization, and pictorial representation. Recent examples from evolutionary robotics and network approaches to biology and neuroscience demonstrate the increasingly important role played by computer simulations (...) and mathematical representations in the epistemic practices of mechanism discovery and mechanism description. These examples also indicate that the scope of mechanistic explanation must be re-examined: With new and increasingly powerful methods of discovery and description comes the possibility of describing mechanisms far more complex than traditionally assumed. (shrink)

In the literature on dynamical models in cognitive science, two issues have recently caused controversy. First, what is the relation between dynamical and mechanistic models? I will argue that dynamical models can be upgraded to be mechanistic as well, and that there are mechanistic and non-mechanistic dynamical models. Second, there is the issue of explanatory power. Since it is uncontested the mechanistic models can explain, I will focus on the non-mechanistic variety of dynamical models. (...) It is often claimed by proponents of mechanistic explanations that such models do not really explain cognitive phenomena . I will argue against this view. Although I agree that the three arguments usually offered to vindicate the explanatory power of non-mechanistic dynamical models are not enough, I consider a fourth argument, namely that such models provide understanding. The Voss strong anticipation model is used to illustrate this. (shrink)

The central aim of this paper is to shed light on the nature of explanation in computational neuroscience. I argue that computational models in this domain possess explanatory force to the extent that they describe the mechanisms responsible for producing a given phenomenon—paralleling how other mechanistic models explain. Conceiving computational explanation as a species of mechanistic explanation affords an important distinction between computational models that play genuine explanatory roles and those that merely provide accurate descriptions or predictions of (...) phenomena. It also serves to clarify the pattern of model refinement and elaboration undertaken by computational neuroscientists. (shrink)

The term ‘mechanism’ has been used in two quite different ways in the history of biology. Operative, or explanatory mechanism refers to the step-by-step description or explanation of how components in a system interact to yield a particular outcome . Philosophical Mechanism, on the other hand, refers to a broad view of organisms as material entities, functioning in ways similar to machines — that is, carrying out a variety of activities based on known chemical and physical processes. In the (...) early twentieth century philosophical Mechanism became the foundation of a ‘new biology’ that sought to establish the life sciences on the same solid and rigorous foundation as the physical sciences, including a strong emphasis on experimentation. In the context of the times this campaign was particularly aimed at combating the reintroduction of more holistic, non-mechanical approaches into the life sciences . In so doing, Mechanists failed to see some of the strong points of non-vitalistic holistic thinking. The two approaches are illustrated in the work of Jacques Loeb and Hans Spemann. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to elucidate the notions of explanation and mechanism, in particular of the social kind. A mechanism is defined as what makes a concrete system tick, and it is argued that to propose an explanation proper is to exhibit a lawful mechanism. The so-called covering law model is shown to exhibit only the logical aspect of explanation: it just subsumes particulars under universals. A full or mechanismic explanation involves mechanismic law statements, not purely descriptive ones (...) such as functional relations and rate equations. Many examples from the natural, biosocial, and social sciences are examined. In particular, macro-micro-micro-macro social relations are shown to explain other wise puzzling macro-macro links. The last part of the article relates the author's progress, over half a century, toward understanding mechanism and explanation. (shrink)

Many explanations in molecular biology, neuroscience, and other fields of experimental biology describe mechanisms underlying phenomena of interest. These mechanistic explanations account for higher-level phenomena in terms of causally active parts and their spatiotemporal organization. What makes such a mechanistic description explanatory? The best-developed answer, Craver's causal-mechanical account, has several weaknesses. It does not fully explicate the target of explanation, interlevel relation, or interactive nonmodular character of many biological mechanisms as we understand them. An alternative account of (...) MEx, emphasizing interdependence among a mechanism's components, remedies these difficulties. (shrink)

Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences. His main concern is that they have so few well-established laws. Elster develops an interesting substitute: a special kind of mechanism designed to fill the explanatory gap between laws and mere description. However, his mechanisms suffer from a characteristic problem that I will explore in this article. As our causal knowledge of a specific problem grows we might come to know too much to make use of an Elsterian (...) mechanism but still lack a law. We might then find ourselves in the paradoxical position of knowing more relevant causal truths about the phenomenon we are interested in than we did before, but being able to explain less. If this possibility is realized in social science settings, as I argue it might well be, Elster?s mechanistic account is threatened. Moreover, even if the possibility is rarely realized in that way, it raises, simply as a possibility, a conceptual problem with Elster?s mechanistic framework. (shrink)

The mechanistic account of computation offers one promising and influential theory of computational implementation. The aim of this paper is to shore up its conceptual foundations by responding to several recent challenges. After outlining and responding to a recent proposal from Kuokkanen (2022a), I suggest that computational description should be conceptualised as a form of idealisation (selectively attending to modified subsets of model features) rather than abstraction (selectively attending to subsets of features within a target system). I argue (...) that this conceptualisation not only offers the best way of making sense of computational implementation, but also a way of resolving each of the outstanding challenges facing the mechanistic account. The idealisation view allows the mechanistic account to make sense of the omission process found in computational descriptions without leaving the relationship between physical and computational properties mysterious. (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)

§1. Overview. Philosophers and mathematicians have drawn lots of conclusions from Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and related results from mathematical logic. Languages, minds, and machines figure prominently in the discussion. Gödel's theorems surely tell us something about these important matters. But what?A descriptive title for this paper would be “Gödel, Lucas, Penrose, Turing, Feferman, Dummett, mechanism, optimism, reflection, and indefinite extensibility”. Adding “God and the Devil” would probably be redundant. Despite the breath-taking, whirlwind tour, I have the modest aim of forging (...) connections between different parts of this literature and clearing up some confusions, together with the less modest aim of not introducing any more confusions.I propose to focus on three spheres within the literature on incompleteness. The first, and primary, one concerns arguments that Gödel's theorem refutes the mechanistic thesis that the human mind is, or can be accurately modeled as, a digital computer or a Turing machine. The most famous instance is the much reprinted J. R. Lucas [18]. To summarize, suppose that a mechanist provides plans for a machine,M, and claims that the output ofMconsists of all and only the arithmetic truths that a human, or the totality of human mathematicians, will ever or can ever know. We assume that the output ofMis consistent. (shrink)

Despite widespread recognition that psychiatry would be better served by a classificatory system based on etiology rather than mere description, it goes without saying that much of the necessary work is yet to be done. In this chapter I take up the increasingly important question of how mechanistic explanation fits into the larger effort to build a scientifically sound etiological and nosological framework. I sketch a rough picture of what mechanistic explanation should look like in the context (...) of psychiatric research, with a focus on several potential challenges posed by the special features of many psychiatric conditions. These include the role of social and environmental factors, the relatively transient nature of symptoms, the presumably complex organization of underlying systems, and the likelihood that many disorders are the product of nonstandard development. I suggest that these explanatory challenges can be met with a sufficiently broad notion of mechanism, one that allows for something less than the flawless execution of internal operations, appeals to the influence of contextual factors, and attends to organizational relations both within the mechanism itself and across the wider cognitive system. (shrink)

The idea at the core of the New Mechanical account of explanation can be summarized in the claim that explaining means showing ‘how things work’. This simple motto hints at three basic features of Mechanistic Explanation (ME): ME is an explanation-how, that implies the description of the processes underlying the phenomenon to be explained and of the entities that engage in such processes. These three elements trace a fundamental contrast with the view inherited from Hume and later from (...) strict logical empiricism (see Creath 2017), focused on epistemic and formal features of science and according to which issues concerning the kind of entities and processes that lie within a theory’s domain are extraneous to science and belong instead to ontology or metaphysics. Philosophers belonging to the new mechanical philosophy believe that the received view of scientific explanation (Hempel 2001), pivoting on the notion of law of nature, overshadows this insight. Since its origin in the 17th century, mechanical philosophy aimed to explain natural phenomena by reducing them to mechanisms. Traditional attempts to define the concept of mechanism involved the identification of a limited set of fundamental elements as, for instance, contact action, action at a distance, inertial motion (see e.g. Hesse 2005), and, more recently, transmission of a mark, or of a conserved quantity (see Frisch, this volume). The new mechanical philosophy rejects this austere characterization of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation and aim at providing a novel, philosophically rigorous explication of the concept of mechanism and of its role in scientific explanation and practice. ME has been adopted with profit in philosophy of special sciences (for instance in biomedical sciences, e.g. in the explanation of chemical transmission at synapses ((Machamer, Darden and Craver 2000), MDC henceforth); but also in social sciences, e.g. the three kinds of social mechanisms in Coleman’s analysis of Max Weber’s account of the role of the Protestant ethic in the growth of capitalism (Hedström and Swedberg 1998)), where exceptionless regularities are rarely ever found. In physics, it is generally possible to formulate explanations in law-based form, with the result that the plurality of explanatory forms might be overlooked. This should not come as a surprise, given that physics was the main inspiration for logical empiricists, and, in particular, Newtonian physics was a template for Hempel’s formulation of the covering law model. However, this situation is unfortunate, since, we will argue, knowing how things work is often part of the explanation of physical phenomena. In this chapter, we provide an introduction to the basic features of ME, with specific focus on its application to physics (section 1). The main part of the chapter is devoted to the defence of two theses: on the one hand, some domains of physics are not compatible with mechanistic reasoning and explanation (section 2); on the other hand, a comprehensive account of explanation in physics can’t dispense with ME (section 3). (shrink)

A possible atomic mechanism underlying the Re- and Ru-induced strengthening effects on the n - n ' interface in Ni-based single-crystal superalloys has been investigated using the DMol3 molecular orbital package based on density functional theory. The calculation of bonding properties has been performed on a cluster designed to model Re and Ru strengthening effects within the interface. The stronger Re--Ni bonds are formed mainly as a result of d- hybridization, while the Ni--Ni bonding become weaker accompanying the Re substitution. (...) The vertical and horizontal bond orders for a local environmental cluster are proposed and developed for the description of the strengthening effect on the n - n ' interface, with larger bond order values achieving better effect. Results show that both Re and Ru significantly strengthen the interface. It is also shown that the strengthening effect of Re is better than that of Ru, and this is explained in terms of the charge transfer of electrons between orbitals of Ru atom according to Mulliken population analysis. The calculation results provide a basis for understanding the atomic mechanism of Re- and Ru-induced n - n ' interfacial strengthening. (shrink)

Causal mediation mechanisms are well supported by available experimental evidence and provide a practicable way to reductive physicalism. According to the causal mediation account of mechanistic explanation, descriptions as diverse as ‘black-box’ phenomena, mechanistic sketches and schemas mixing physically interpreted and operationalized biological, psychological and social variables, and detailed descriptions of mechanisms refer to the same causal structure circumscribed within the spatiotemporal boundaries of a replicable experimental setup. The coreference of coarser- and finer-grained descriptions of causal structures opens (...) new possibilities for testing the reductive physicalism conjecture. I discuss experimental designs supporting the causal mediation account and show how recent studies demonstrating the biological mediation of mind-mind causal processes can provide evidence for reductive physicalism. (shrink)

This paper discusses a class of mechanistic explanations employed in engineering science where the activities and organization of nonstandard entities are cited as core factors responsible for failures. Given the use of mechanistic language by engineers and the manifestly mechanistic structure of these explanations, I consider several interpretations of these explanations within the new mechanical framework. I argue that these interpretations fail to solve several philosophical problems and propose an account of fictional mechanism explanations instead. According to (...) this account, fictional mechanism explanations provide descriptions of fictional mechanisms that enable the tracking of counterfactual dependencies of the physical system they model by capturing system constraints. Engineers use these models to learn about and understand properties of materials, to build computational simulations of their behaviour, and to design new materials. (shrink)

The notion of levels has been widely used in discussions of cognitive science, especially in discussions of the relation of connectionism to symbolic modeling of cognition. I argue that many of the notions of levels employed are problematic for this purpose, and develop an alternative notion grounded in the framework of mechanistic explanation. By considering the source of the analogies underlying both symbolic modeling and connectionist modeling, I argue that neither is likely to provide an adequate analysis of processes (...) at the level at which cognitive theories attempt to function: One is drawn from too low a level, the other from too high a level. If there is a distinctly cognitive level, then we still need to determine what are the basic organizational principles at that level. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that in recent literature on mechanistic explanations, authors tend to conflate two distinct features that mechanistic models can have or fail to have: plausibility and richness. By plausibility, we mean the probability that a model is correct in the assertions it makes regarding the parts and operations of the mechanism, i.e., that the model is correct as a description of the actual mechanism. By richness, we mean the amount of detail the model (...) gives about the actual mechanism. First, we argue that there is at least a conceptual reason to keep these two features distinct, since they can vary independently from each other: models can be highly plausible while providing almost no details, while they can also be highly detailed but plainly wrong. Next, focusing on Craver's continuum of ?how-possibly,? to ?how-plausibly,? to ?how-actually? models, we argue that the conflation of plausibility and richness is harmful to the discussion because it leads to the view that both are necessary for a model to have explanatory power, while in fact, richness is only so with respect to a mechanism's activities, not its entities. This point is illustrated with two examples of functional models. (shrink)

The objectives of this paper are twofold. The first is to present a differentiation between two kinds of deferred uses of indexicals: those in which indexical utterances express singular propositions (I term them deferred reference proper) and those where they express general propositions (called descriptive uses of indexicals). The second objective is the analysis of the descriptive uses of indexicals. In contrast to Nunberg, who treats descriptive uses as a special case of deferred reference in which a property contributes to (...) the proposition expressed, I argue that examples in which a general proposition is indeed expressed by an indexical cannot be treated by assuming that the property is a deferred referent of the pronoun. I propose an analysis of descriptive uses of indexicals by means of a pragmatic mechanism of ‘descriptive anaphora’, which attempts to explain the special kind of contribution of the property retrieved from the context to the proposition that is characteristic of the descriptive interpretation. (shrink)

This article reviews contributions to The Volitional Brain, some of which defend a libertarian, contra-causal account of free will, while others take a so-called compatibilist view, in which adequate conceptions of human liberty and moral responsibility are claimed to be compatible with naturalistic causality. Siding with compatibilism, this review finds that defenders of libertarian free will place undue weight on the first person feeling of freedom, while discounting scientific evidence that human choices are fully a function of antecedent causes at (...) various levels of description. It is argued that morality, justice, and personal responsibility and efficacy do not require the assumption that persons are first causes, so that we need not fear mechanism when applied to human agency. (shrink)

The paper argues that in the "timaeus" plato views the phenomena in and of themselves as a positive source of evil, moving erratically without psychic causes whether rational or irrational, direct or indirect, and so the paper argues that "timaeus" contradicts the psychic autokenetic doctrine from the "phaedrus" and "laws x". The argument is based on a detailed analysis of "timaeus", 52d-53a and 58a-c, plato's description of chaos an his 'atomic' theory.

During the process of E. coli nucleotide excision repair, DNA damage recognition and processing are achieved by the action of the uvrA, uvrB, and uvrC gene products. The availability of highly purified proteins has lead to a detailed molecular description of E. coli nucleotide excision repair that serves as a model for similar processes in eukaryotes. An interesting aspect of this repair system is the protein complex's ability to work on a vast array of DNA lesions that differ widely (...) in their chemical composition and molecular architecture. Here we propose a model for damage recognition in which the UvrB protein serves as the component that confers enhanced specificity to a preincision complex. We hypothesize that one major determinant for the formation of a stable preincision complex appears to be the disruption of base stacking interactions by DNA lesions. (shrink)

Consider two fairly simple, natural occurrences: a storm at sea and an earthquake. Many descriptions of these things have been made, but what interests us here are their scientific descriptions. In the first case, then, we have to deal with changes in the pressure and temperature of the atmosphere, with violent motions of the air and with waves in the sea. In the second case we deal with stratified rocks that are in a state of severe strain. When this strain (...) exceeds a certain limit the rocks are fractured and waves are set up in the elastic materials of the earth's crust. In most cases storms and earthquakes happen when we do not expect them, and so there is usually little time to investigate them in an adequate manner. But there is no doubt whatever that if we could make all the researches that are practicable we could “ explain” individual storms and earthquakes. “Explanation” means re-describing the phenomena in the simplest manner possible, that is, in terms of space, time, gravitation, energy-transformations, chemical constitution of the materials concerned, etc. Such explanations can be made of the occurrences mentioned above, and the physical ideas we have noted are all that are included in the explanations. (shrink)

The results of econometric modeling are fragile in the sense that minor changes in estimation techniques or sample can lead to statistical models that support inconsistent causal hypotheses. The fragility of econometric results undermines making conclusive inferences from the empirical literature. I argue that the program of evidential pluralism, which originated in the context of medicine and encapsulates to the normative reading of the Russo-Williamson Thesis that causal claims need the support of both difference-making and mechanistic evidence, offers a (...) ground for resolving empirical disagreements. I analyze a recent econometric controversy regarding the tax elasticity of cigarette consumption and smoking intensity. Both studies apply plausible estimation techniques but report inconsistent results. I show that mechanistic evidence allows for discriminating econometric models representing genuine causal relations from accidental dependencies in data. Furthermore, I discuss the differences between biological and social mechanisms and mechanistic evidence across the disciplines. I show that economists mainly rely on mathematical models to represent possible mechanisms. Still, claiming the actuality of the represented mechanisms requires establishing that crucial assumptions of these models are descriptively adequate. I exemplify my approach to assessing the quality of mechanistic evidence in economics with an analysis of two models of rational addiction. (shrink)

Concretization is a concept that has different meanings in different psychological theories and varying manifestations in different psychotherapies. In psychodrama, much of the available information on concretization draws on J. L. Moreno’s initial conceptualization, descriptive case studies, and interpretations in the various approaches. However, concretization has not been empirically studied as a concept or as a therapeutic mechanism of change. Therefore, the purpose of this qualitative study was to generate an empirically based conceptualization and operationalization of concretization as well as (...) to identify its clinical benefits in psychodrama. To this end, semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with seven experienced psychodrama therapists. Using a grounded theory approach for the data analysis, the model that emerged consists of three pathways toward concretization: realistic concretization, symbolic concretization, and integrated concretization. The findings suggest a sequential multistep operation that can be linear or nonlinear, depending on the protagonist’s need. The findings also underscore four benefits of concretization as a mechanism of change in psychodrama: reducing the ambiguity of the problem, externalizing the protagonist’s problem, enhancing the therapist-protagonist therapeutic bond, and bypassing the protagonist’s defense mechanisms. The model is discussed in light of the findings and the literature, and future directions are suggested. (shrink)

In the 1950s and 1960s, an interfield interaction between molecular biologists and biochemists integrated important discoveries about the mechanism of protein synthesis. This extended discovery episode reveals two general reasoning strategies for eliminating gaps in descriptions of the productive continuity of mechanisms: schema instantiation and forward chaining/backtracking. Schema instantiation involves filling roles in an overall framework for the mechanism. Forward chaining and backtracking eliminate gaps using knowledge about types of entities and their activities. Attention to mechanisms highlights salient features of (...) this historical episode while providing general reasoning strategies for mechanism discovery. (shrink)

Many well-known arguments in the philosophy of mind use thought experiments to elicit intuitions about consciousness. Often, these thought experiments include mechanistic explanations of a systems’ behavior. I argue that when we understand a system as a mechanism, we are not likely to understand it as an agent. According to Arico, Fiala, Goldberg, and Nichols’ (2011) AGENCY Model, understanding a system as an agent is necessary for generating the intuition that it is conscious. Thus, if we are presented with (...) a mechanistic description of a system, we will be very unlikely to understand that system as conscious. Many of the thought experiments in the philosophy of mind describe systems mechanistically. I argue that my account of consciousness attributions is preferable to the “Simplicity Intuition” account proposed by David Barnett (2008) because it is more explanatory and more consistent with our intuitions. Still, the same conclusion follows from Barnett’s “Simplicity” account and from my own account: we should reassess the conclusions that have been drawn from many famous thought experiments. (shrink)

Hodgkin and Huxley’s model of the action potential is an apparent dream case of covering‐law explanation in biology. The model includes laws of physics and chemistry that, coupled with details about antecedent and background conditions, can be used to derive features of the action potential. Hodgkin and Huxley insist that their model is not an explanation. This suggests either that subsuming a phenomenon under physical laws is insufficient to explain it or that Hodgkin and Huxley were wrong. I defend Hodgkin (...) and Huxley against Weber’s heteronomy thesis and argue that explanations are descriptions of mechanisms. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Philosophy‐Neuroscience‐Psychology Program, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, Wilson Hall, St. Louis, MO 63130; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

At the end of the nineteenth century, approaches from experimental physiology made inroads into embryological research. A new generation of embryologists felt urged to study the mechanisms of organ formation. This new program, most prominently defended by Wilhelm Roux, was called Entwicklungsmechanik. Named variously as “causal embryology”, “physiological embryology” or “developmental mechanics”, it catalyzed the movement of embryology from a descriptive science to one exploring causal mechanisms. This article examines the specific scientific and epistemological meaning of the mechanistic approaches (...) of embryological development by focusing on Wilhelm His’ histogenetic work. Roux was neither the first, nor the only one to argue for an experimental exploration of causes in embryology. At the time of Roux, physiological explanations of the genesis of the anatomical forms were developing in parallel, not only in German-speaking countries, but in France, Switzerland and English-speaking countries as well. The experimental approach and the cellular descriptions of embryogenesis were already omni-present when Roux proposed his Entwicklungsmechanik. However, these approaches remained disjointed. It appears that it was Wilhelm His who first succeeded in combining the question of the causal factors determining epigenesis, which was closely connected with experimentation on, and cellular descriptions of, development, in a coherent and concrete synthesis, making him one of the true initiators of the developmental mechanics. (shrink)

Recently, it has been provocatively claimed that dynamical modeling approaches signal the emergence of a new explanatory framework distinct from that of mechanistic explanation. This paper rejects this proposal and argues that dynamical explanations are fully compatible with, even naturally construed as, instances of mechanistic explanations. Specifically, it is argued that the mathematical framework of dynamics provides a powerful descriptive scheme for revealing temporal features of activities in mechanisms and plays an explanatory role to the extent it is (...) deployed for this purpose. It is also suggested that more attention should be paid to the distinctive methodological contributions of the dynamical framework including its usefulness as a heuristic for mechanism discovery and hypothesis generation in contemporary neuroscience and biology. (shrink)

Demonstrative thoughts are distinguished by the fact that their contents are determined relationally, via perception, rather than descriptively. Therefore, a fundamental task of a theory of demonstrative thought is to elucidate how facts about visual perception can explain how these thoughts come to have the contents that they do. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how cognitive psychology may help us solve this metasemantic question, through empirical models of visual processing. Although there is a dispute between attentional and (...) non-attentional models concerning the best metasemantic mechanism for demonstrative thoughts, in this paper I will argue in favor of a hybrid model, which combines both types of processes. In this picture, attentional and non-attentional mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and each plays a specific role in determining the singular content of demonstrative thoughts. (shrink)

There is an intimate relation between these two aspects of the judgment: the predictive judgment is certainly not a priori. It presupposes some antecedent judgment that the sugar in the spoon does taste sweet or that it did taste sweet. This does not necessarily presuppose the antecedent direct experience of tasting the sugar, for its antecedent could be an inferred judgment, or a communicated and believed judgment. But, on the other hand, neither is the produced judgment of an experienced sweetness (...) clearly a posteriori; for to determine that what was tasted is sweet involves a subtle interplay of expectation and antecedent definition of sweetness which is of the nature of the judgment event, and which is, broadly speaking, predictive. It would be terribly neat if predictions were clearly a priori and postdictions clearly a posteriori and both logical atomism and its correlate functional form, mechanism, would be able to build unassailable causal systems on such hard "givens.". (shrink)

The Tableaux Work Bench (TWB) is a meta tableau system designed for logicians with limited programming or automatic reasoning knowledge to experiment with new tableau calculi and new decision procedures. It has a simple interface, a history mechanism for controlling loops or pruning the search space, and modal simplification.

With the further acceleration of urbanization in China, the proportions of both urban residents’ energy consumption and energy-consuming terminal electricity are showing an increasing trend at the same time. In view of the dynamic and time-varying complex system characteristics of power system, it is of great significance to study the impact mechanism of urbanization residents’ electricity consumption on the realization of demand-side management and environmental protection. Based on the one-year follow-up survey data obtained from household meter reading, this paper studies (...) the impact mechanism of urban residents’ electricity consumption in different seasons and terminals by descriptive analysis and multiple linear regression model. The results show that, on the whole, electricity is a necessity for urban households and does not change significantly with changes in income. At the turn of summer and autumn and the turn of winter and spring, high-income families tend to use higher levels of energy in pursuit of comfort, while low- and middle-income families do not have luxury consumption. In different seasons, the influence mechanism of household electricity consumption at different terminals is different. (shrink)

Opponents of the new mechanistic account of scientific explanation argue that the new mechanists are committed to a ‘More Details Are Better’ claim: adding details about the mechanism always improves an explanation. Due to this commitment, the mechanistic account cannot be descriptively adequate as actual scientific explanations usually leave out details about the mechanism. In reply to this objection, defenders of the new mechanistic account have highlighted that only adding relevant mechanistic details improves an explanation and (...) that relevance is to be determined relative to the phenomenon-to-be-explained. Craver and Kaplan (B J Philos Sci 71:287–319, 2020) provide a thorough reply along these lines specifying that the phenomena at issue are contrasts. In this paper, we will discuss Craver and Kaplan’s reply. We will argue that it needs to be modified in order to avoid three problems, i.e., what we will call the Odd Ontology Problem, the Multiplication of Mechanisms Problem, and the Ontic Completeness Problem. However, even this modification is confronted with two challenges: First, it remains unclear how explanatory relevance is to be determined for contrastive explananda within the mechanistic framework. Second, it remains to be shown as to how the new mechanistic account can avoid what we will call the ‘Vertical More Details are Better’ objection. We will provide answers to both challenges. (shrink)

Mechanisms pervade the sciences, and a significant portion of scientific research is concerned with their discovery and description. This paper is concerned with the latter, categorizing the components that should be included in the description of a mechanism. In describing mechanisms, the question of relevant level of description often arises; the question is where, if anywhere, one should halt a reductionist approach. In this paper, I propose a framework for mechanistic description that identifies the 'relevant' (...) hierarchical levels of a mechanism based on their contributions to the functionality of the mechanism's endproduct. Mechanisms culminate in an endproduct, be it an activity or an entity, and that endproduct has qualities that allow it to participate in certain subsequent (or higher level) mechanisms. The proposed framework takes into account the level of description necessary to result in a functional endproduct; that is, an endproduct that exhibits the enabling properties required for it to fulfill its known roles in other mechanisms. Adhering to this framework results in a mechanistic description containing only the components that directly contribute to endproduct functionality. By constraining the hierarchical level of the description, the mechanistic sequence is clarified and made practical for many research applications where inadvertent focus on irrelevant details can prove costly. (shrink)

This paper presents a human-computer interaction model with a three layers learning mechanism in a pervasive environment. We begin with a discussion around a number of important issues related to human-computer interaction followed by a description of the architecture for a multi-agent cooperative design system for pervasive computing environment. We present our proposed three- layer HCI model and introduce the group formation algorithm, which is predicated on a dynamic sharing niche technology. Finally, we explore the cooperative reinforcement learning and (...) fusion algorithms; the paper closes with concluding observations and a summary of the principal work and contributions of this paper. (shrink)

The mechanistic framework traditionally comes bundled with a multi-level view. Some ascribe ontological weight to these levels, whereas others claim that characterising a higher-level entity and the corresponding lower-level mechanism are only different descriptions of the same thing. The goal of this paper is to develop a consistent metaphysical picture that can underly the latter position. According to this flat view, wholes and their parts are embedded in the same network of interacting units. The flat view preserves the original (...) virtues of the mechanistic approach and is able to avoid the problems associated with the multi-level view. (shrink)

Cognitive science views thought as computation; and computation, by its very nature, can be understood in both rational and mechanistic terms. In rational terms, a computation solves some information processing problem (e.g., mapping sensory information into a description of the external world; parsing a sentence; selecting among a set of possible actions). In mechanistic terms, a computation corresponds to causal chain of events in a physical device (in engineering context, a silicon chip; in biological context, the nervous (...) system). The discipline is thus at the interface between two very different styles of explanation—as the papers in the current special issue well illustrate, it explores the interplay of rational and mechanistic forces. (shrink)

The Higgs mechanism gives mass to Yang-Mills gauge bosons. According to the conventional wisdom, this happens through the spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry. Yet, gauge symmetries merely reflect a redundancy in the state description and therefore the spontaneous breaking can not be an essential ingredient. Indeed, as already shown by Higgs and Kibble, the mechanism can be explained in terms of gauge invariant variables, without invoking spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this paper, we present a general discussion of such gauge (...) invariant treatments for the case of the Abelian Higgs model, in the context of classical field theory. We thereby distinguish between two different notions of gauge: one that takes all local transformations to be gauge and one that relates gauge to a failure of determinism. (shrink)

This article reviews contributions to The Volitional Brain, some of which defend a libertarian, contra-causal account of free will, while others take a so-called compatibilist view, in which adequate conceptions of human liberty and moral responsibility are claimed to be compatible with naturalistic causality. Siding with compatibilism, this review finds that defenders of libertarian free will place undue weight on the first person feeling of freedom, while discounting scientific evidence that human choices are fully a function of antecedent causes at (...) various levels of description. It is argued that morality, justice, and personal responsibility and efficacy do not require the assumption that persons are first causes, so that we need not fear mechanism when applied to human agency. (shrink)

Context: Contemporary philosophy of consciousness has not yet come up with an acceptable theory of consciousness. Philosophers are still not able to reach agreement, and have come to a deadlock, since all possible approaches seem to have been exhausted and all the arguments repeatedly discussed. Problem: It may be assumed that the crisis has been caused by factors rooted in initial, wrong attitudes to knowledge or, more specifically, in epistemology focused on first-order cybernetics. The situation might be altered if philosophy (...) of consciousness can be refocused on second-order cybernetics. This means that any attempt to apply the subject-object model to consciousness and specifically to reflection should be given up, while consciousness should not be seen as a certain objective essence observable by a researcher. It also means that the principles underlying theories of consciousness should be revised: any attempts that aim to explain the mechanism of generating consciousness through non-consciousness should be abandoned. The purpose of this article is methodological, pointing out the approaches to studying consciousness that might be more effective. It also gives the author’s vision of a new way of treating consciousness, taking into account the stated methodology. Method: Theoretical conceptual methods of argumentation, such as logical and philosophical kinds of proof. Results: The research shows that the epistemology underlying second-order cybernetics can eliminate many of the paradoxes typical of present-day theories of consciousness that are related to different versions of reductionism. It also explains that, in contrast to the dualistic subject-object model used for description of consciousness, the latter can and should be seen as a strictly self-describing system, where the diversity of forms and states is explained by inherent differences. Implications: The article could be productive for epistemic theories, philosophy of mind theories, mind-body theories, and phenomenological theories of consciousness. Constructivist content: The research applies the principles of von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics, von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism, and some of Bateson’s ideas about difference, information, and mind structure directly to the epistemological assumptions underlying philosophy of consciousness. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind (from eliminative materialists to psychofunctionalists to interpretivists) generally assume that a normative ideal delimits which mental phenomena exist (though they disagree about how to characterize the ideal in question). This assumption is dubious. A comprehensive ontology of mind includes some mental phenomena that are neither (a) explanatorily fecund posits in any branch of cognitive science that aims to unveil the mechanistic structure of cognitive systems nor (b) ideal (nor even progressively closer to ideal) posits in any (...) given folk psychological practice. Indeed, one major function of scientific psychology has been (and will be) to introduce just such (normatively suboptimal but real) mental phenomena into folk psychological taxonomies. The development and public dissemination of IQ research over the course of the 20th Century is a case in point. (shrink)

ID: 89 / Parallel 4k: 2 Single paper Topics: Philosophy of mind, Philosophy of science Keywords: Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Mechanistic explanations, Reductionism, Normativity, Generality, Emerging School of Philosophers of Science. The role of philosophy in cognitive science: mechanistic explanations, normativity, generality Mohammadreza Haghighi Fard Leiden University, Netherlands, The; [email protected] Introduction -/- Cognitive science, as an interdisciplinary research endeavour, seeks to explain mental activities such as reasoning, remembering, language use, and problem solving, and the explanations it advances commonly (...) involve descriptions of the mechanisms responsible for these activities. Cognitive mechanisms are distinguished from the mechanisms invoked in other domains of biology by involving the processing of information. Many of the philosophical issues discussed in the context of cognitive science involve the nature of information processing. For philosophy of science, a central question is what counts as a scientific explanation. But what is a mechanistic explanation and how does it work, how can philosophy of science use it as a solution for the problem of integration in cognitive science? By answering these questions and merging my answers with discussion of concepts of philosophy, normativity and generality, I will investigate the following claim. -/- I claim that philosophy by using strength concepts such as normativity, generality, and a mechanistic philosophy of explanations, can be a most important contributor to cognitive science. I also investigate how philosophy of science could be (can be) a bridge between psychology and neuroscience. We need a distinction between philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy in cognitive science; I am talking about the latter. -/- This claim is very important for the integration and the future of the interdisciplinary field known as cognitive science. -/- Philosophy as a true cognitive science -/- When the Cognitive Science Society was founded, in the late 1970s, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology were playing smaller roles. The three disciplines that formed the core group were artificial intelligence, psychology, and linguistics. The curious thing is that George Miller, a psychologist and an important founder of cognitive sciences in a hexagon diagram that he presented, put philosophy at the top of the diagram and neuroscience at the very bottom. There is enough agreement now that neuroscience is the most important contributor to cognitive science and there are fair connections between philosophy and neuroscience. In that diagram there was almost no connection between philosophy and neuroscience. -/- The developments and rise of cognitive science in the last half-century has been accompanied by considerable amount of philosophical activity. Perhaps no other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. (Bechtel and Graham, 1998. Rumelhart and Bly 1999. Bechtel, Mandik, Mundale 2001. Thagard, 2007. Bennett and Dennett et al, 2007. Bennett and Hacker, 2008. Andler, 2009. Frankish and Ramsey, 2012.) -/- Many philosophers of science offer conclusions that have a direct bearing on cognitive science and its practitioners can profit from closer engagement with the rest of cognitive science. For example, William Bechtel has discussed three projects, two in naturalistic philosophy of mind and one in naturalistic philosophy of science that have been pursued during the past 30 years, that he contends, can make theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitive science (Bechtel, 2009). Paul Thagard is another example of the mentioned emerging school of philosophers of science that define cognitive science as the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence (Thagard, 2006). Thagard by presenting some general but important philosophical questions such as, “What is the nature of the explanations and theories developed in cognitive science?”, and by providing answers to these central questions has showed how philosophy of science can help cognitive science by the advantage of its generality. Andrew Brook, however, believes that philosophical approaches have never had a settled place in cognitive science but he is listed in a group of the philosophers of science that they are contributing very closely the cognitive science (Brook, 2009). Daniel Dennett , as well as being a member the mentioned naturalistic philosophers of science, believes that there is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitive science if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science. -/- What are mechanisms? Let us begin abstractly before considering an example. Mechanisms are collections of entities and activities organized together to do something (cf. Machamer, Darden, & Craver, 2000; Craver & Darden, 2001; Bechtel &Richardson, 1993; Glennan, 1996). These explanations are known as ‘mechanistic explanations’. By using and developing these mechanistic explanations of philosophy of science one can draw normative consequences for cognitive science. Paul Thagard (Thagard, 2006 and 2009), William Bechtel (Bechtel, 2008 and 2009), Andrew Brook (Brook, 2008) investigated and promoted using the ‘normativity’ in philosophy to show a better and crucial role for philosophy of science in an interdisciplinary known as cognitive science. Some philosophers have thought that, in order to pursue this normative function, philosophy must distance itself from empirical matters, but there are examples where the investigations of descriptive and normative issues go hand in hand. ( Thagard, 2009). -/- I will investigate how we can reduce a higher-level science such as psychology to neuroscience without the problems of reductionism but via mechanistic explanations. By problem I mean psychology does not lose its autonomy. -/- Conclusion -/- If cognitive science is all about understanding the human mind, or if cognitive science is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence, since the whole life of philosophy was involving with the ways of knowing (epistemology) and conceptions of reality (metaphysics), also philosophy has considered the so-called mind-body problem ( identity theory, functionalism, and heuristic identity theory) , then philosophy could be the most deserved discipline to be a most contributor in cognitive science. I tried to discuss this by using the three advantages in philosophy, normativity, and generality and by introducing an emerging school of mechanistic (not mechanical) philosophers. One thing left, as cognitive science is a two-way street, philosophers need also to stop in a station of cognitive science and learn from the most important advances in brain and neuroscience. Key references : Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Mechanistic explanations, Reductionism, Normativity, Generality, Emerging School of Philosophers of Science. (shrink)

Descriptive abstraction means omission of information from descriptions of phenomena. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between vertical and horizontal descriptive abstraction. Vertical abstracts away levels of mechanism or organization, while horizontal abstracts away details within one level of organization. The distinction is implicit in parts of the literature, but it has received insufficient attention and gone mainly unnoticed. I suggest that the distinction can be used to clarify how computational descriptions are formed in some variants of the (...) class='Hi'>mechanistic account of physical computation. Furthermore, I suggest that, if this suggestion is adopted, it can be used to resolve what I call abstraction, hierarchy, and generality problems raised against mechanistic account of physical computation. According to the abstraction problem, the mechanistic account of physical computation is conceptually confused in claiming that physical systems process computational, abstract properties. An existing solution distinguishes between descriptive and metaphysical abstraction, suggesting that the abstraction problem unnecessarily postulates metaphysically abstract entities. The solution has been criticized for leading to what I call hierarchy and generality problems: it results in two separate hierarchies, one physical and one computational, making it problematic both to account for the generality of computational descriptions and to specify how the two hierarchies are related to each other. Adopting the vertical-horizontal distinction and the view that computational descriptions are achieved by horizontal abstraction allows one to account for the generality of computational descriptions, and to form a single hierarchy in which there are no separate hierarchies in need of integration. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to replace the old concept of truth in mathematics, based on the Set Structure provided with idea of true and false characterized by the presence of a characteric function \, by a mathematical structures founded on the idea of Topos, the triple structure \\}\) and the notion of Gradual Truth or Steps from the truth. Our motivations is to understand the mathematical structures underlying the emergence’s mechanism and phenomena. We think that this approach could (...) be useful to better appreciate the subtleties of the notion of truth and gives us a better understanding of the complex and changing phenomena. (shrink)

The mechanism by which the mammalian kidney creates the osmotic gradient necessary for urine concentration remains an open question. We present a brief survey of the give-and-take between theory and experiment on this question over the last half century. We start with the introduction of the countercurrent multiplier paradigm in 1951. We finish with a description of a recent suggestion that the explanation for the enigmatic inner medullary osmotic gradient may reside in the very metabolism of the inner medullary (...) cells, which are required by the region's hypoxia to obtain their ATP largely from anaerobic glycolysis and which thus, by the same token, furnish net osmoles to the medullary interstitium by convering glucose to lactate. (shrink)

An entirely different mechanism and localization were recently proposed for the COPII coat complex, challenging its well‐accepted function to select and concentrate cargo into small COPII‐coated spherical transport vesicles. Instead, the COPII complex is suggested to form a dynamic yet stationary collar that forms a boundary between the ER and the ER export membrane domain. This membrane domain, the ER exit site (ERES), is the site of COPII‐mediated sorting and concentration of transport competent proteins. Subsequently, the ERES is implicated to (...) mature and bud to form a sizeable pleiomorphic transport carrier that translocate on microtubules to fuse with the Golgi apparatus. Despite this drastic mechanistic dogma shift, most of the underlying protein‐protein and protein‐membrane interactions remain unchanged. Here, we attempt to provide a detailed description of the newly proposed model of how ER to Golgi transport works by describing the role of several essential proteins of the transport machinery. (shrink)

Demonstrative thoughts are distinguished by the fact that their contents are determined relationally, via perception, rather than descriptively. Therefore, a fundamental task of a theory of demonstrative thought is to elucidate how facts about visual perception can explain how these thoughts come to have the contents that they do. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how cognitive psychology may help us solve this metasemantic question, through empirical models of visual processing. Although there is a dispute between attentional and (...) non-attentional models concerning the best metasemantic mechanism for demonstrative thoughts, in this paper I will argue in favor of a hybrid model, which combines both types of processes. In this picture, attentional and non-attentional mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and each plays a specific role in determining the singular content of demonstrative thoughts. (shrink)