Abstract
Although noting the importance of organization in mechanisms, the new mechanistic philosophers of science have followed most biologists in focusing primarily on only the simplest mode of organization in which operations are envisaged as occurring sequentially. Increasingly, though, biologists are recognizing that the mechanisms they confront are non-sequential and the operations nonlinear. To understand how such mechanisms function through time, they are turning to computational models and tools of dynamical systems theory. Recent research on circadian rhythms addressing both intracellular mechanisms and the intercellular networks in which these mechanisms are synchronized illuminates this point. This and other recent research in biology shows that the new mechanistic philosophers of science must expand their account of mechanistic explanation to incorporate computational modeling, yielding dynamical mechanistic explanations. Developing such explanations, however, is a challenge for both the scientists and the philosophers as there are serious tensions between mechanistic and dynamical approaches to science, and there are important opportunities for philosophers of science to contribute to surmounting these tensions.
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Notes
Important predecessors of the new mechanistic philosophy of science are Wimsatt (1976, p. 671), who argued that “at least in biology, most scientists see their work as explaining types of phenomena by discovering mechanisms . . .” and Salmon (1984), who defended a “causal-mechanical view” that drew out the importance of causal relations but said little about what renders a set of causal processes into a mechanism.
There are some important differences between the basic circadian mechanism in Drosophila and mammals, but it is largely conserved. This conservation facilitated the identification of parts of the mammalian mechanism, and the discovery of new components in the mammalian mechanism also supported comparable discoveries in Drosophila (see Bechtel, 2009).
One might view the context-sensitive behavior of parts and operations as a reason to repudiate the project of decomposition. For reasons indicated below, I contend that the project of decomposition remains crucial to mechanistic biology. The context sensitivity of components can be accommodated by articulating the interaction between intrinsic features of components with processes external to them.
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Bechtel, W. Understanding endogenously active mechanisms: A scientific and philosophical challenge. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 2, 233–248 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-012-0046-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-012-0046-x