Mechanisms

Concept Sketch:

Philosophers of biology have invested immense effort in studying the nature and use of mechanisms. They were initially positioned as an alternative to laws of nature in several respects, including explanation, scientific reasoning, and scientific discovery.

Exactly what mechanisms are, however, has remained controversial in a particularly frustrating way that seems to block meaningful progress. Some papers even delve deep into the exegesis of founding texts from the 1990s and early 2000s to uncover clues. This presupposes there is a right answer that's available with the current methods and assumptions of the debate. At the same time, many philosophers will voice a skepticism, not typically in print, that mechanisms have proven up to the initial promises made.

This concept sketch aims to explore a possible reason why mechanisms have proven to be such a shadowy target. The basic idea is that philosophers were inspired by scientific practice and argued that this practice depended on the existence of mechanisms in nature. This represents a first abstraction from practice to metaphysical posit. See for example Bechtel and Abrahamson 2005: "Our own approach is to begin with a basic characterization of mechanisms as found in nature and then... elaborate it into a framework for mechanistic explanation."

The confusion comes from the apparent unitariness of this metaphysical posit when abstracted from the practices that first motivated it. The first wave of arguments about the definition of mechanisms tried to tackle this issue of the nature of mechanisms on the terms of metaphysics itself, rather than the practical projects of scientists referencing them. While it has returned to arguing from observations of scientific practice, the subsequent wave of discussion has nonetheless tried to maintain a general conception of mechanism that ranges across the biological disciplines. That there are many natures to mechanisms, often specified only to the level needed by a local project, has never been raised as a position to my knowledge. But this has the initial virtue of staying close to the original inspiration for mechanisms as a topic while making sense of the philosophical lacuna we have faced in trying to precisely define their general nature.

Does this position lead to ever greater fragmentation in the philosophical study and importance of mechanisms? Certainly it puts new weight on attending to the aims of particular projects and what they ask of and do with mechanisms. But one can also look at bigger projects where scientists ask how things more broadly "hang together," although we should be careful to recognize this may take other forms than theory and models, such as a collection of living strains, or a database, or a national center for experimental methods.