Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T18:16:05.798Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Thinking about Mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Peter Machamer ,
Lindley Darden  and
Carl F. Craver
Peter Machamer*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh
Lindley Darden
Affiliation:
Committee on History and Philosophy of Science, University of Maryland
Carl F. Craver
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Florida International University
*
†Send requests for reprints to Lindley Darden, Department of Philosophy, 1125A Skinner Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742; [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The concept of mechanism is analyzed in terms of entities and activities, organized such that they are productive of regular changes. Examples show how mechanisms work in neurobiology and molecular biology. Thinking in terms of mechanisms provides a new framework for addressing many traditional philosophical issues: causality, laws, explanation, reduction, and scientific change.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‡

We thank the following people for their help: D. Bailer-Jones, A. Baltas, J. Bogen, R. Burian, G. Carmadi, R. Clifton, N. Comfort, S. Culp, F. di Poppa, G. Gale, S. Glennan, N. Hall, L. Holmes, T. Iseda, J. Josephson, J. Lederberg, J. E. McGuire, G. Piccinini, P. Pietroski, H. Rheinberger, W. Salmon, S. Sastry, K. Schaffner, R. Skipper, P. Speh, D. Thaler, and N. Urban. Lindley Darden's work was supported by the General Research Board of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland and as a Fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh; Carl Craver's work was supported by a Cognitive Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Maryland. Both Lindley Darden and Carl Craver were supported by a National Science Foundation Grant (SBR-9817942); any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.

References

Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret ([1971] 1981), “Causality and Determination”, in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, v. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 133–147.Google Scholar
Bechtel, William and Richardson, Robert C. (1993), Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Belozersky, Andrei N. and Spirin, Alexander S. (1958), “A Correlation between the Compositions of Deoxyribonucleic and Ribonucleic Acids”, Nature 182: 111–112.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brandon, Robert (1985), “Grene on Mechanism and Reductionism: More Than Just a Side Issue”, in Asquith, Peter and Kitcher, Philip (eds.), PSA 1984, v. 2. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 345–353.Google Scholar
Burian, Richard M. (1996), “Underappreciated Pathways Toward Molecular Genetics as Illustrated by Jean Brachet's Cytochemical Embryology”, in Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.), The Philosophy and History of Molecular Biology: New Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 671–85.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Nancy (1989), Nature's Capacities and Their Measurement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Craver, Carl F. (1998), Neural Mechanisms: On the Structure, Function, and Development of Theories in Neurobiology. Ph.D. Dissertation. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh.Google Scholar
Craver, Carl F. (under review), “Functions, Mechanisms, and Hierarchy in Contemporary Neurobiology”.Google Scholar
Craver, Carl F. and Darden, Lindley (forthcoming), “Discovering Mechanisms in Neurobiology: The Case of Spatial Memory”, in Machamer, Peter, Grush, R., and McLaughlin, P. (eds.), Theory and Method in the Neurosciences. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Crick, Francis (1958), “On Protein Synthesis”, Symposium of the Society of Experimental Biology 12: 138–167.Google ScholarPubMed
Crick, Francis. (1959), “The Present Position of the Coding Problem”, Structure and Function of Genetic Elements: Brookhaven Symposia in Biology 12: 35–39.Google ScholarPubMed
Crick, Francis. (1988), What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Crick, Francis. (1996), “The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology”, in Krishnamurthy, Ramesh S. (ed.), The Pauling Symposium: A Discourse on the Art of Biography. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections, 3–18.Google Scholar
Cutting, James E. (1986), Perception with an Eye for Motion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Darden, Lindley (1991), Theory Change in Science: Strategies from Mendelian Genetics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Darden, Lindley. (1995), “Exemplars, Abstractions, and Anomalies: Representations and Theory Change in Mendelian and Molecular Genetics”, in Lennox, James G. and Wolters, Gereon (eds.), Concepts, Theories, and Rationality in the Biological Sciences. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 137–158.Google Scholar
Darden, Lindley. (1996), “Generalizations in Biology: Essay Review of K. Schaffner's Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 27: 409–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darden, Lindley and Cook, Michael (1994), “Reasoning Strategies in Molecular Biology: Abstractions, Scans and Anomalies”, in Hull, David, Forbes, Micky, and Burian, Richard M. (eds.), PSA 1994, v. 2. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 179–191.Google Scholar
Gamow, George (1954), “Possible Relation between Deoxyribonucleic Acid and Protein Structures”, Nature 173: 318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glennan, Stuart S. (1992), Mechanisms, Models, and Causation. Ph.D. Dissertation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Glennan, Stuart S. (1996), “Mechanisms and The Nature of Causation”, Erkenntnis 44: 49–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Zach W. (ed.) (1992), An Introduction to Molecular Neurobiology. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.Google Scholar
Judson, Horace F. (1996), The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology. Expanded Edition. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.Google Scholar
Kauffman, Stuart A. (1971), “Articulation of Parts Explanation in Biology and the Rational Search for Them”, in Buck, Roger C. and Cohen, Robert S. (eds.), PSA 1970. Dordrecht: Reidel, 257–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Machamer, Peter (1998), “Galileo's Machines, His Mathematics and His Experiments”, in Machamer, Peter (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Galileo. New York: Cambridge University Press, 27–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Machamer, Peter. (forthcoming), “The Nature of Metaphor and Scientific Descriptions”, in Hallyn, Fernand (ed.), Metaphor and Models in Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Machamer, Peter and Woody, Andrea (1994), “A Model of Intelligibility in Science: Using Galileo's Balance as a Model for Understanding the Motion of Bodies”, Science and Education 3: 215–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mackie, John Leslie (1974), The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Morange, Michel (1998), A History of Molecular Biology. Translated by Cobb, Matthew. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Nagel, Ernest (1961), The Structure of Science. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olby, Robert (1970), “Francis Crick, DNA, and the Central Dogma”, in Holton, Gerald (ed.), The Twentieth Century Sciences. New York: W. W. Norton, 227–280.Google Scholar
Rescher, Nicholas (1996), Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (1997), Experimental Systems: Towards a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, Wesley (1984) Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, Wesley. (1997), “Causality and Explanation: A Reply to Two Critiques”, Philosophy of Science 64: 461–477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmon, Wesley. (1998), Causality and Explanation. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffner, Kenneth (1993), Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Shepherd, Gordon M. (1988), Neurobiology, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Watson, James D. ([1962] 1977), “The Involvement of RNA in the Synthesis of Proteins”, in Nobel Lectures in Molecular Biology 1933–1975. New York: Elsevier, 179–203.Google Scholar
Watson, James D. (1965) Molecular Biology of the Gene. New York: W. A. Benjamin.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William (1972), “Complexity and Organization”, in Schaffner, Kenneth F. and Cohen, Robert S. (eds.), PSA 1972, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Dordrecht: Reidel, 67–86.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William. (1976), “Reductive Explanation: A Functional Account”, in Cohen, Robert S. (ed.), PSA 1974. Dordrecht: Reidel, 671–710. Reprinted in Elliott Sober (ed.) (1984), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology: An Anthology, 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 477–508.Google Scholar
Zamecnik, Paul C. (1969), “An Historical Account of Protein Synthesis, With Current Overtones—A Personalized View”, Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 34: 1–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed