Ideas from 'Thinking About Mechanisms' by Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C [2000], by Theme Structure

[found in 'Philosophy of Science' (ed/tr -) [- ,]].

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7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 2. Processes
Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range
                        Full Idea: Activities can be identified spatiotemporally, and individuated by rate, duration, and types of entity and property that engage in them. They also have modes of operation, directionality, polarity, energy requirements and a range.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
                        A reaction: This is their attempt at making 'activity' one of the two central concepts of ontology, along with 'entity'. A helpful analysis. It just seems to be one way of slicing the cake.
8. Modes of Existence / C. Powers and Dispositions / 2. Powers as Basic
Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does
                        Full Idea: It is not the penicillin that causes the pneumonia to disappear, but what the penicillin does.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.1)
                        A reaction: This is a very neat example for illustrating how we slip into 'entity' talk, when the reality we are addressing actually concerns processes. Without the 'what it does', penicillin can't participate in causation at all.
11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 2. Understanding
We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities
                        Full Idea: The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
                        A reaction: In other words, we understand complex things by reducing them to things we do understand. It would, though, be illuminating to see a nest of interconnected activities, even if we understood none of them.
14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / e. Lawlike explanations
The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it
                        Full Idea: It is not regularities that explain but the activities that sustain the regularities.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
                        A reaction: Good, but we had better not characterise the 'activities' in terms of regularities.
14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / h. Explanations by function
Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms
                        Full Idea: It is common to speak of functions as properties 'had by' entities, …but they should rather be understood in terms of the activities by virtue of which entities contribute to the workings of a mechanism.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
                        A reaction: I'm certainly quite passionately in favour of cutting down on describing the world almost entirely in terms of entities which have properties. An 'activity', though, is a bit of an elusive concept.
14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / i. Explanations by mechanism
Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems
                        Full Idea: One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
                        A reaction: The difficulty seems to be that you could broaden the concept of 'mechanism' indefinitely, so that it covered history, mathematics, populations, cultural change, and even mathematics. Where to stop?
Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change
                        Full Idea: Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular change from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
                        A reaction: This is their initial formal definition of a mechanism. Note that a mere 'activity' can be included. Presumably the mechanism might have an outcome that was not the intended outcome. Does a random element disqualify it? Are hands mechanisms?
A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced
                        Full Idea: To give a description of a mechanism for a phenomenon is to explain that phenomenon, i.e. to explain how it was produced.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
                        A reaction: To 'show how' something happens needs a bit of precisification. It is probably analytic that 'showing how' means 'revealing the mechanism', though 'mechanism' then becomes the tricky concept.
Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities
                        Full Idea: We emphasise the activities in mechanisms. This is explicitly dualist. Substantivalists speak of entities with dispositions to act. Process ontologists reify activities and try to reduce entities to processes. We try to capture both intuitions.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
                        A reaction: [A quotation of selected fragments] The problem here seems to be the raising of an 'activity' to a central role in ontology, when it doesn't seem to be primitive, and will typically be analysed in a variety of ways.
Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant
                        Full Idea: Nested hierachical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. …Bottoming out is relative …the explanation comes to an end, and description of lower-level mechanisms would be irrelevant.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1)
                        A reaction: This seems to me exactly the right story about mechanism, and it is a story I am associating with essentialism. The relevance is ties to understanding. The lower level is either fully understood, or totally baffling.
14. Science / D. Explanation / 3. Best Explanation / b. Ultimate explanation
There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena
                        Full Idea: There are four bottom-out kinds of activities: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic. These are abstract means of production that can be fruitfully applied in particular cases to explain phenomena.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
                        A reaction: I like that. It gives a nice core for a metaphysics for physicalists. I suspect that 'mechanical' can be reduced to something else, and that 'energetic' will disappear in the final story.
15. Nature of Minds / C. Capacities of Minds / 3. Abstraction by mind
We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail
                        Full Idea: Abstractions may be constructed by taking an exemplary case or instance and removing detail.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.3)
                        A reaction: I love 'removing detail'. That's it. Simple. I think this process is the basis of our whole capacity to formulate abstract concepts. Forget Frege - he's just describing the results of the process. How do we decide what is 'detail'? Essentialism!
26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 11. Against Laws of Nature
Laws of nature have very little application in biology
                        Full Idea: The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology.
                        From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2)
                        A reaction: This is a simple and self-evident fact, and bad news for anyone who want to build their entire ontology around laws of nature. I take such a notion to be fairly empty, except as a convenient heuristic device.