Abstract
This paper advances the thesis of methodological mechanism, the claim that to be committed to mechanism is to adopt a certain methodological postulate, i.e. to look for causal pathways for the phenomena of interest. We argue that methodological mechanism incorporates a minimal account of understanding mechanisms, according to which a mechanism just is a causal pathway described in the language of theory. In order to argue for this position we discuss a central example of a biological mechanism, the mechanism of cell death, known as apoptosis. We argue that this example shows that our philosophically deflationary account is sufficient in order to have an illuminating account of mechanisms as the concept is used in biology.
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Notes
For a view along similar lines, consider this quotation from Brandon (1990, 185, emphasis added): “A causal/mechanical explanation is one that explains the phenomenon of interest in terms of the mechanisms that produced the phenomenon. What is a mechanism? … [T]his question has no general metaphysical answer, because the business of science is the discovery of mechanisms; so we cannot delimit in any a priori manner the mechanisms of nature. … The best we can do is to give an open-ended answer: a mechanism is any describable causal process”.
Let us also note here in passing that in the recent literature on mechanisms, mechanisms are very often regarded as specific kinds of systems. We think that this is misleading, since mechanisms and systems are different things: mechanisms on our view are causal pathways, and it is strange to call a causal pathway a ‘system’ (see also Oulis 2010).
For example, here is how Virchow in the nineteenth century describes necrosis in Cellular Pathology: “In necrosis we conceive the mortified [gangrenous] part to be preserved more or less in its external form” (quoted in Majno and Joris 1995, 3–4).
However, see Proskuryakov and Gabai (2010) for the argument that necrosis can in certain cases be considered as an active and well-regulated process.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the audience of the ‘Mechanisms in Medicine’ workshop (Centre of Reasoning, University of Kent, UK), where a previous version of this paper was presented, for their valuable feedback.
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Ioannidis, S., Psillos, S. In Defense of Methodological Mechanism: The Case of Apoptosis. Axiomathes 27, 601–619 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-017-9354-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-017-9354-2