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An explanatory taste for mechanisms

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Abstract

Mechanistic explanations, according to one prominent account, are derived from objective explanations (Craver 2007, 2014). Mechanistic standards of explanation are in turn pulled from nature, and are thereby insulated from the values of investigators, since explanation is an objectively defined achievement grounded in the causal structure of the world (Craver 2014). This results in the closure of mechanism’s explanatory standards—it is insulated from the values, norms and goals of investigators. I raise two problems with this position. First, it relies on several ontological claims which, while plausible, fail to guarantee the objectivity of mechanistic explanatory standards to the degree of certainty required. Second, Craver’s position itself introduces a value–laden explanatory standard—the 3M requirement (Kaplan & Craver 2011)—which undermines the closure of explanatory standards. I show how in practice mechanistic explanation is in part guided by explanatory taste, shorthand for background contextual values that influence our standards of explanation. Mechanism often has a particular pragmatically-oriented taste for control, and gerrymanders explanatory standards in order to obtain it. I conclude by arguing that objectivity, rather than being obtained through the right set of explanatory standards, is better thought of as the result of processes of intersubjective criticism, which renders visible the contextual values of communities of investigators and allows them to be controlled for (Longino 1990).

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Notes

  1. Important to note here are the different ways in which Craver (2007; 2014) uses the term mechanistic explanation The term can refer to a text that accurately characterises the real mechanistic explanation–in–the–world, or it can refer to that explanation–in–the–world itself. I will show in the coming sections that for Craver these two senses are nevertheless intimately linked, such that the standards of the former fall out of the objectively–known facts we can glean about the nature of the latter.

  2. The ontic mechanist account is however not divorced from consideration of epistemic virtues: an explanation may be more or less easily grasped, be more or less computable, and be more or less easily communicated to others, and these are worthwhile considerations when producing explanatory texts (Craver & Kaplan 2018). Nevertheless, considerations of these virtues do not bear on the question of what makes for an explanation that satisfies mechanistic explanatory standards.

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Meyer, R. An explanatory taste for mechanisms. Phenom Cogn Sci 22, 821–840 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09802-0

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