Abstract
While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation over laws and nomological explanation, paradigmatic mechanisms—e.g., clocks or synapses—actually exhibit a great deal of stability in their behavior. And while mechanisms of this kind are certainly of great importance, there are many events that do not occur as a consequence of the operation of stable mechanisms. Events of natural and human history are often the consequence of causal processes that are ephemeral and capricious. In this paper I shall argue that, notwithstanding their ephemeral nature, these processes deserve to be called mechanisms. Ephemeral mechanisms share important characteristics with their more stable cousins, and these shared characteristics will help us to understand connections between scientific and historical explanation.
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Notes
The argument for the supposedly distinctive character of the natural and the human sciences goes back to the hermeneutical tradition of the nineteenth century, especially to the work of Dilthey. A classic contemporary statement of the position is given by Taylor (1971).
For a thorough history of the development and ultimate failure of the covering law approach written from Salmon’s point of view, see his (1990).
See Glennan (2002) for a more extended discussion of the relationship between causal nexus approach and the mechanistic systems approach. In that paper, I characterize the former approach as the process approach and the latter approach as the systems approach.
This sort of explanatory pluralism is not just a feature of human history. Sterelny (1996) makes a parallel case for evolutionary biology, distinguishing between what he calls actual sequence and robust process explanations.
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Acknowledgments
I presented early versions of this paper in talks at the University of Chicago and at Washington University in St. Louis, where I benefitted from comments from the audiences. I’m also grateful for comments from John Beatty and from two anonymous referees from Erkenntnis that led to substantial improvements in the final paper.
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Glennan, S. Ephemeral Mechanisms and Historical Explanation. Erkenn 72, 251–266 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9203-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9203-9