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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Which Logic is the Right Logic?' and 'Thinking About Mechanisms'

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8 ideas

14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / e. Lawlike explanations

16563	The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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

16555	Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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

16528	Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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?

16529	Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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?

16530	A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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.

16553	Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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.

16559	Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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

16564	There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	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.