Mechanistic explanation of the small by the BIG

2002

Erkenntnis

"Craver claims that mechanistic explanation is ontic, while Bechtel claims that it is epistemic. While this distinction between ontic and epistemic explanation originates with Salmon, the ideas have changed in the modern debate on mechanistic explanation, where the frame of the debate is changing. I will explore what Bechtel and Craver’s claims mean, and argue that good mechanistic explanations must satisfy both ontic and epistemic normative constraints on what is a good explanation. I will argue for ontic constraints by drawing on Craver’s work in section 2.1, and argue for epistemic constraints by drawing on Bechtel’s work in section 2.2. Along the way, I will argue that Bechtel and Craver actually agree with this claim. I argue that we should not take either kind of constraints to be fundamental, in section 3, and close in section 4 by considering what remains at stake in making a distinction between ontic and epistemic constraints on mechanistic explanation. I suggest that we should not concentrate on either kind of constraint, to the neglect of the other, arguing for the importance of seeing the relationship as one of integration."

European Journal of Philosophy of Science, 2: 375–394, 2012

ABSTRACT: 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.

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 2013

This paper explores the question of whether all or most explanations in biology are, or ideally should be, 'mechanistic'. I begin by providing an account of mechanistic explanation, making use of the interventionist ideas about causation I have developed elsewhere. This account emphasizes the way in which mechanistic explanations, at least in the biological sciences, integrate difference-making and spatio-temporal information, and exhibit what I call fine-tunedness of organization. I also emphasize the role played by modularity conditions in mechanistic explanation. I will then argue, in agreement with John Dupré, that, given this account, it is plausible that many biological systems require explanations that are relatively nonmechanical or depart from expectations one associates with the behaviour of machines.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Talk of levels is ubiquitous in philosophy, especially in the context of mechanistic explanations spanning multiple levels. The mechanistic conception of levels, however, does not allow for the kind of integration needed to construct such multi-level mechanistic explanations integrating observations from different scientific domains. To address the issues arising in this context, I build on a certain perspectival aspect inherent in the mechanistic view. Rather than focusing on compositionally related levels of mechanisms, I suggest analyzing the situation in terms of epistemic perspectives researchers take when making scientific observations. Characterizing epistemic perspectives along five dimensions allows for a systematic analysis of the relations the scientific observations made from these different epistemic perspectives. This, in turn, provides a solid foundation for integrating the mechanistic explanations that are based on the scientific observations in question.

History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences, 2023

Despite the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century, mechanistic explanations show a striking methodological continuity from early modern science to current scientific practice. They are rooted in the traditional method of analysis and synthesis, which was the background of Galileo's resolutive-compositive method and Newton's method of deduction from the phenomena. In early modern science as well as in current scientific practice, analysis aims at tracking back from the phenomena to the principles, i.e., from wholes to parts, and from effects to causes. Vice versa, synthesis aims at explaining the phenomena from the parts and their interactions. Today, mechanistic explanations are atomistic in a generalized sense. They have in common to explain higher-level phenomena in terms of lowerlevel components and their causal actions or activities. In quantum physics, the lower-level components are subatomic particles, and the causes are their quantum interactions. After the quantum revolution, the approach continues to work in terms of the sum rules which hold for conserved properties of the parts and the whole. My paper focuses on the successes and limitations of this approach, with a side glance at the recent generalization of mechanistic explanations in cognitive neuroscience.

2010

History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences, 2023

One assumption of the new mechanistic approach is that there are two kinds of mechanistic explanations: etiological and constitutive ones. While the former explain phenomena in terms of their preceding causes, the latter are supposed to refer to mechanisms that constitute phenomena. Based on arguments by Kaiser

Erkenntnis, 2013

The mechanistic and causal accounts of explanation are often conflated to yield a 'causal-mechanical' account. This paper prizes them apart and asks: if the mechanistic account is correct, how can causal explanations be explanatory? The answer to this question varies according to how causality itself is understood. It is argued that difference-making, mechanistic, dualist and inferentialist accounts of causality all struggle to yield explanatory causal explanations, but that an epistemic account of causality is more promising in this regard. §1 The mechanistic account of explanation The mechanistic account of explanation is the cornerstone of the recent interest in mechanisms in the philosophy of science. Thus Machamer et al. (2000) begin their paper with: In many fields of science what is taken to be a satisfactory explanation requires providing a description of a mechanism. So it is not surprising that much of the practice of science can be understood in terms of the discovery and description of mechanisms (Machamer et al., 2000, pp. 1-2). Mechanistic accounts of explanation have also been put forward by Salmon (1984, 1998); Glennan (2002); Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2005); Craver (2007) and others. Note that different authors have different things in mind when they talk about mechanisms. One school of thought has it that mechanisms need to be understood as physical processes, i.e., spatiotemporally contiguous processes in which a mark or a conserved quantity is propagated between interactions (Reichenbach, 1956; Salmon, 1984, 1998; Dowe, 2000). An example of this sort of mechanism is a signal from a remote control to open a garage door: pressing the button constitutes an interaction which leads to the transmission of a signal that is propagated in such a way that it can interact with a receiver at the garage. An alternative to the physical-process view is the idea of complex-systems mechanisms (CSMs). These consist of entities and activities organised in such a way that they are responsible for some phenomenon (see, e.g., Machamer et al., 2000; Illari and Williamson, 2012). An example is the remote control mechanism itself, responsible for sending the signal that opens the garage door: this is a more-or-less stable arrangement of parts that can engage in characteristic activities that lead to the transmission of the signal. These views need not be construed as alternatives. One can also take a broad view of mechanisms, according to which mechanisms involve physical processes or complex-systems mechanisms or some combination of the two. An explanation of the garage door opening might then describe or point to: (i) the CSM for producing the signal; (ii) the physical signal itself; and (iii) the CSM for receiving the signal and opening the door. Note that two types of explanation are possible: single-case, i.e., a particular garage door opening is explained by (i-iii) together with the particular fact that the remote control was triggered in the appropriate way; or generic, i.e., garage door openings in general are explained by (i-iii). Most of the following discussion will apply to both single-case and generic explanation. A second distinction is also useful. An explanation in practice is a communication that aims to increase the understanding of an interlocutor by describing how an explanandum (a single-case event or a generic phenomenon) is produced by underlying mechanisms that the interlocutor understands or accepts better than the explanandum itself. On the other hand, an ideal explanatory text is an imaginary text that would recursively describe all the underlying mechanisms: i.e., that includes descriptions of the mechanisms that are responsible for the explanandum, other mechanisms that are responsible for the appropriate functioning of those mechanisms, and so on. The concept of an ideal explanatory text faces the bottoming-out problem: some account needs to be given as to whether there is a lowest level of

Mechanisms are organized systems of parts that operate in such a way as to produce phenomena. It would seem, however, that mechanistic explanations can be indefinitely detailed and expanded by bottoming out at lower levels of composition and by taking into consideration higher-level systems. Given the possibility of an indefinite descent to lower levels of composition, how deep does one need to go in order to claim that the explanation satisfactorily accounts for the phenomenon of interest? And given the possibility of a progressive integration into more holistic contexts, how far one needs to go in order to claim that the mechanism described in the explanation acts as an independent module capable of producing the phenomenon on its own? I argue that the answer to these questions lies in the elaboration of norms for evaluating the completeness of mechanistic explanations.