Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- William P. Bechtel (2005). The Challenge of Characterizing Operations in the Mechanisms Underlying Behavior. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 84:313-325.Neuroscience and cognitive science seek to explain behavioral regularities in terms of underlying mechanisms. An important element of a mechanistic explanation is a characterization of the operations of the parts of the mechanism. The challenge in characterizing such operations is illustrated by an example from the history of physiological chemistry in which some investigators tried to characterize the internal operations in the same terms as the overall physiological system while others appealed to elemental chemistry. In order for biochemistry to become successful, researchers had to identify a new level of operations involving operations over molecular groups. Existing attempts at mechanistic explanation of behavior are in a situation comparable to earlier approaches to physiological chemistry, drawing their inspiration either from overall psychology activities or from low-level neural processes. Successful mechanistic explanations of behavior require the discovery of the appropriate component operations. Such discovery is a daunting challenge but one on which success will be beneficial to both behavioral scientists and cognitive and neuroscientists.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
| Export citation | Other links: mechanism.ucsd.edu ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pubmedcentral.nih.gov | Scholar
Discussion of William P. Bechtel, The challenge of characterizing operations in the mechanisms underlying behavior
Nothing in this forum yet.
Similar books and articles
Cognitive psychologists, like biologists, frequently describe mechanisms when explaining phenomena. Unlike biologists, who can often trace material transformations to identify operations, psychologists face a more daunting task in identifying operations that transform information. Behavior provides little guidance as to the nature of the operations involved. While not itself revealing the operations, identification of brain areas involved in psychological mechanisms can help constrain attempts to characterize the operations. In current memory research, evidence that the same brain areas are involved in what (...)
No categories
In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: journals.uchicago.edu | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: journals.uchicago.edu | Scholar | More.. Two widely accepted assumptions within cognitive science are that (1) the goal is to understand the mechanisms responsible for cognitive performances and (2) computational modeling is a major tool for understanding these mechanisms. The particular approaches to computational modeling adopted in cognitive science, moreover, have significantly affected the way in which cognitive mechanisms are understood. Unable to employ some of the more common methods for conducting research on mechanisms, cognitive scientists’ guiding ideas about mechanism have developed in conjunction with their (...)
No categories
Arguments for the autonomy of psychology or other higher-level sciences have often taken the form of denying the possibility of reduction. The form of reduction most proponents and critics of the autonomy of psychology have in mind is theory reduction. Mechanistic explanations provide a different perspective. Mechanistic explanations are reductionist insofar as they appeal to lower-level entities—the component parts of a mechanism and their operations— to explain a phenomenon. However, unlike theory reductions, mechanistic explanations also recognize the fundamental role of (...)
The mechanistic perspective has dominated biological disciplines such as biochemistry, physiology, cell and molecular biology, and neuroscience, especially during the 20th century. The primary strategy is reductionist: organisms are to be decomposed into component parts and operations at multiple levels. Researchers adopting this perspective have generated an enormous body of information about the mechanisms of life at scales ranging from the whole organism down to genetic and other molecular operations.
No categories
Reductionist inquiry, which involves decomposing a mechanism into its parts and operations, is only one of the tasks of mechanistic research. A second task (which may be undertaken largely simultaneously) is recomposing it—conceptually reassembling the parts and operations into an organized arrangement that constitutes the mechanism. Other tasks include determining how multiple operations are orchestrated in real time, and investigating how the mechanism interacts with the environment in which it is situated.
No categories
trying to explain these reactions in terms of changes in ele- began trying to characterize physiological processes in.
In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: cogsci.rpi.edu mechanism.ucsd.edu data.cstr.ed.ac.uk | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: cogsci.rpi.edu mechanism.ucsd.edu data.cstr.ed.ac.uk | Scholar | More.. 1. The Naturalistic Turn in Philosophy of Science 2. The Framework of Mechanistic Explanation: Parts, Operations, and Organization 3. Representing and Reasoning About Mechanisms 4. Mental Mechanisms: Mechanisms that Process Information 5. Discovering Mental Mechanisms 6 . Summary.
In the context of mechanistic explanation, reductionistic research pursues a decomposition of complex systems into their component parts and operations. Using research on circadian rhythms and memory consolidation as exemplars, we consider the gains to be made by finding genes and proteins that figure in mechanisms underlying behavioral phenomena. However, we also show that such research is insufficient to explain the initial phenomenon. Accordingly, researchers have increasingly recognized the need to consider higher-level organization and integration with other systems. This illustrates (...)
No categories
Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ dia- grams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations (...)
No categories
This paper presents a monotonic system of Post algebras of order +* whose chain of Post constans is isomorphic with 012 ... -3-2-1. Besides monotonic operations, other unary operations are considered; namely, disjoint operations, the quasi-complement, succesor, and predecessor operations. The successor and predecessor operations are basic for number theory.
