Abstract
Mechanisms are now taken widely in philosophy of science to provide one of modern science’s basic explanatory devices. This has raised lively debate concerning the relationship between mechanisms, laws and explanation. This paper focuses on cases where a mechanism gives rise to a ceteris paribus law, addressing two inter-related questions: (1) What kind of explanation is involved? and (2) What is going on in the world when mechanism M affords behavior B described in a ceteris paribus law? We explore various answers offered by ‘new mechanists’ and others before setting out and explaining our own answers: (1) mechanistic explanations are a species of oldfashioned covering-law explanation and this often accounts in part for their explanatory power; and (2) B is what it takes for some set of principles that govern the features of M’s parts in their arrangement in M all to be instanced together.
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Notes
This characterisation from Illari and Williamson 2012 is labelled a “consensus concept” by them and by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article ‘Mechanisms in Science’ (Craver and Tabery 2017). See that article for an extended discussion. Our characterisation of mechanisms in this paper is in accord with that, with Cartwright’s work on mechanisms and cp laws, and with the characterisations of the so-called ‘new mechanists’
(including much of the work by newer ‘new mechanists’). As Craver and Tabery report: “Three characterizations are most commonly cited:
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MDC: ‘Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions’ …
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Glennan: ‘A mechanism for a behavior is a complex system that produces that behavior by the interaction of a number of parts, where the interaction between parts can be characterized by direct, invariant, change-relating generalizations’ ...
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Bechtel and Abrahamsen: ‘A mechanism is a structure performing a function in virtue of its component parts, component operations, and their organization. The orchestrated functioning of the mechanism is responsible for one or more phenomena’ ...
Each of these characterizations contains four basic features: (1) a phenomenon, (2) parts, (3) causings, and (4) organization.”
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We suppose, like many ‘new mechanists’ (see e.g. Glennan 2017, especially chapters 4 and 5), that individual mechanisms can be grouped under type labels and that the regularities we record as cp laws may arise from either the repeat operation of an individual mechanism, and hence be conditioned on the operation of that specific individual (like the planetary system) or from the operation of a plurality of mechanisms of the same type. In this latter case they are conditioned on mechanisms of that type (e.g. neurons) and could be expected to break down in any specific case where the specific token of that type misfires. We shall elide this distinction between types and tokens here because our points hold equally for both.
Some remarks about terminology. We suppose that in the cases we focus on, mechanisms – things in the world – give rise to regular behaviors, which are also things in the world. Accounts of what these mechanisms are like and how they operate explain these behaviors, which can be described in cp laws. For ease of expression we shall sometimes talk, as is not unusual in discussions in philosophy of science, of mechanisms or mechanistic explanations explaining the cp laws that describe regular behaviors.
We shall confine our attention to cp causal laws although mechanisms can give rise to behaviors described in non-causal laws as well. There is a vast literature on cp laws and on the factors nodded to in the cp clause. We focus here on the need to inter alia condition them on the proper operation of the nomological machine / mechanism that gives rise to them. The important topic of cp laws is addressed elsewhere by the authors – see e.g. Cartwright 2002, Pemberton and Cartwright 2014 – it is not explored further here. Also, we shall use ‘laws’ and ‘principles’ interchangeably, depending on what is common usage for the ones under discussion; and, as noted already, where there is no danger of confusion, we may not always distinguish cp laws from the behaviors they describe.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging us to make this implication explicit.
As an anonymous referee suggests.
We also can include IS – inductive statistical – as well, as we note below. But it seems excessive to lay out that familiar definition too.
We do not posit a single universal criterion of explanatory correctness and are thus amongst those that James Woodward characterises as moving away from a strict universalist position (Woodward 2014, Section 7, para 1).
For instance, explanation of Kepler’s laws by the structure of the planetary system and the laws governing it.
Often, as an anonymous referee remarks, M is or seems to be in place and operating and the appropriate input occurs but the output does not, so B (‘input causes output’) does not occur. That can happen even when covering laws are involved in the appropriate way for a number of different reasons: because M does not really obtain (some parts or features or arrangements are flawed), something interferes with M’s operation, the laws are only tendency laws or they are stochastic or they are even more permissive (e.g. they dictate a range of outcomes but don’t fix a probability over them). This last is allowed on Mitchell’s pragmatic view. It was discussed by GEM Anscombe in her Cambridge Inaugural Lecture (Anscombe 1971) where she argued that laws may describe a cause that is ‘enough’ for the effect to occur but is not logically sufficient for the effect. It is also defended by Pemberton and Cartwright 2014.
You could just treat the specific functional form as yet another ‘boundary’ condition. In this case your CL explanation is not properly mechanistic. But the fuller explanation we cite here – which is the standard one – is mechanistic: it takes the parts and arrangements and interactions as the boundary condition and uses the law of gravity to assign F.
For yet a different kind of example consider CG Hempel’s own reconstruction of John Dewey’s explanation of some peculiar behavior he observed in soap bubbles in which the particular facts that enter into the explanans describe the parts involved and their arrangement: “the tumblers had been immersed in soap suds of a temperature considerably higher than that of the surrounding air; they were put, upside down, on a plate on which a puddle of soapy water had formed that provided a connecting soap film, and so on” (Hempel 1970, page 336). Note also Hempel’s remark in the famous short text Philosophy of Natural Science: “As this use [to explain Kepler’s and Galileo’s law] of Newton’s laws illustrates, empirical laws are often explained by means of theoretical principles that refer to structures and processes underlying the uniformities in question” (Hempel 1966, page 51. Emphasis added).
See also Craver and Kaiser 2013.
See footnote 12 for more on why ‘expected’ behaviour may fail.
That is, RB is an instance of all those principles holding, just as the earth’s travelling in an elliptical orbit is jointly an instance of F = ma and FG = GMm/r2.
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Acknowledgements
Nancy Cartwright’s work for this paper is based upon research supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1632471 and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 667526 K4U), for which she is very grateful. It is acknowledged that the content of this work reflects only the authors’ views and that the ERC is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
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Cartwright, N., Pemberton, J. & Wieten, S. Mechanisms, laws and explanation. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 10, 25 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00284-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00284-y