Abstract
I note the multitude of ways in which, beginning with the classic paper by Machamer et al. (Philos Sci 67:1–25, 2000), the mechanists have qualify their methodological dicta, and limit the vulnerability of their claims by strategic vagueness regarding their application. I go on to generalize a version of the mechanist requirement on explanations due to Craver and Kaplan (Philos Sci 78(4):601–627, 2011) in cognitive and systems neuroscience so that it applies broadly across the life sciences in accordance with the view elaborated by Craver and Darden in In Search of Mechanisms (2013). I then go on to explore what ramifications their mechanist requirement on explanations may have for explanatory “dependencies” reported in biology and the special sciences. What this exploration suggests is that mechanism threatens to eliminate instead of underwrite a large number of such “dependencies” reported in higher-levels of biology and the special sciences. I diagnose the source of this threat in mechanism’s demand that explanations identify nested causal differences makers in mechanisms, their components, the components further components, and so forth. Finally, I identify the “love–hate” relationship mechanism must have with functional explanation, and show how it makes mechanism an extremely interesting thesis indeed.
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Notes
I have italicized terms that will be important hereafter. The term ‘dependency’ will carry much weight.
In what follows I will assume that causal explanation identifies causal difference makers. More on this in Sect. 3.
Let’s not demand a very strong or contentful notion of ‘model,’ but simply accord the title ‘model’ to whatever is recognized in a special science as an explanatory representation of a regularity or regularities, what 3M labels a “dependency”.
A word about the use of ‘level’ in this paper. I follow mechanists in not elucidating this term. As Craver (2007) notes, the notion cannot be adequately defined in terms mechanists generally employ such as component, constitution, composition, spatial demarcation or size. For purposes of this paper, a level will be the domain of a scientific (sub)discipline described by the proprietary vocabulary of that (sub)discipline.
The term ‘reductionism’ is of course widely used by non-philosophers to label what philosophers more precisely lable as ’eliminativism’—the replacement of higher-level level explanations by lower level ones. Reductionism strictly so called holds that lower level explanations preserve whatever explanatory power a higher-level explanation has, while improving them in various ways—increasing their precision, underwriting the reliability of their dependences, etc.
Cf. Kitcher (1984): “plugging a molecular account into [the cytological] narratives [of meiosis] would decrease the explanatory power of those narratives.” Quoted in Rosenberg and Arp, p. 218. Notice the expression “plugging in” that makes it clear Kitcher’s objection is to reductionism, not eliminativism. See footnote 1.
Here and elsewhere in this paper the pertinent notion of function is that of the ‘selected effects’ etiological concept. For a detailed exposition and defense of the ubiquity of selected effects functions see Neander and Rosenberg (2009).
This is of course what functionalists hold. See for example Weiskopf (2011a) for a recent statement that I treat briefly below.
‘Composition’ would be a more accurate term than constitution. I will use the mechanists’ term with the understanding that what is really involved isn’t the sort of ‘constitution’ issues that interest metaphysicians dealing with identity problems.
This is the threat philosophers of mind face when they seek to accord causal force to intentional states while embracing physicalism.
It is important to notice that though natural selection plays an important role in this explanation, it is not among the mechanisms bringing about differences in skin color, for the simple reason that natural selection is not a mechanism, it is a process. One very obvious reason to disqualify natural selection as a mechanism derives from the mechanist’s recognition that mechanisms are always mechanisms for something or other, whether that some thing is an outcome or effect or whether it is the process in which the mechanism engages. But natural selection is famously not for anything at all, there is no output it is organized to attain. See Garson (2013). The fact that natural selection is not a mechanism will be important hereafter.
As befits a mechanista, Bechtel is slightly cagey about the generality of this claim. When it comes to the mind, he waffles slightly:
The performance of a mental activity also involves material changes, notably changes in sodium and potassium concentrations inside and outside neurons, but the characterization of them as mental activities does not focus on these material changes. Rather, it focuses on such questions as how the organism appropriately relates its behavior to features of its distal environment...The focus is not on the material change within the mechanism, but rather on identifying more abstractly those functional parts and operations that are organized such that the mechanism can interact appropriately in its environment. Thus mental mechanisms are ones that can be investigated taking a physical stance (examining neural structures and their operations) but also, distinctively and crucially, taking an information processing stance. (2008, p. 23).
Has Bechtel surrendered a commitment to mechanism in this consession to information processing? Cf. Weiskopf (2011b).
As noted above, these mechanism will be disjunctive owing to the complex disjunctive pathways that move from different genes (and the mutations that produce them) to optimum vitamin D and folate synthesis. Multiple realizability begins at the first level of implementation in this case.
The ultimate explanation for the eye-spot of a moth’s wing is given by an adaptational account of camouflage. By contrast, the proximate explanation is given by an account of regulatory and structural somatic gene expression.
Weiskopf (2011a) provides examples of genuinely different mechanisms constrained so heavily by evolutionary forces as to converge on the same functional outputs for given inputs in visual perception. Insofar as natural selection can only target real difference makers, these cases represent a challenge to mechanista’s assimilation of a function to merely an abstract physical difference maker.
It bears repeating that here the pertinent notion of function here is the ‘selected-effects sense, and not for example, the ‘causal role’ sense. ‘Causal role’ functions are of interest in the life sciences only to the extent that they have an explicit or implicit evolutionary etiology, i.e. are also selected effects. See Neander and Rosenberg (2009).
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This paper was inspired by arguments about the role of mechanism in developmental biology advanced by Charbel El-Hani in “Downward determination as a propensity changing noncausal relation” (El-Hani 2013).
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Rosenberg, A. Making mechanism interesting. Synthese 195, 11–33 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0713-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0713-5