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16554
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Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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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.
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15147
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Cluster kinds are explained simply by sharing some properties, not by an 'essence' [Chakravartty]
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Full Idea:
The fact that members of some cluster kinds are subjects of causal generalizations reflects the degree to which they share causally efficacious properties, not the fact that they may be composed of essence kinds per se.
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From:
Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 2)
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A reaction:
I think this is right. I am a fan of individual essences, but not of kind essences. I take kinds, and kind explanations, to be straightforward inductive generalisations from individuals. Extreme stabilities give the illusion of a kind essence.
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16562
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We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
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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.
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16555
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Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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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.
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16528
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Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
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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?
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16553
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Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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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.
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16559
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Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1)
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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.
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16564
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There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
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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.
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15146
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Some kinds, such as electrons, have essences, but 'cluster kinds' do not [Chakravartty]
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Full Idea:
Many of the kinds we theorize about and experiment on today simply do not have essences. We can distinguish 'essence kinds', such as electrons, and 'cluster kinds', such as biological species.
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From:
Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 2)
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A reaction:
This is an important point for essentialists. He offers a strict criterion, in Idea 15145, for mind membership, but we might allow species to have essences by just relaxing the criteria a bit, and acknowledging some vagueness, especially over time.
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16558
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Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2)
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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.
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