amy goldber mechanistic models of social processes

First, our exposition of core theses and arguments will provide critics of mechanistic approaches with a clear target. While our project looks backward for arguments to support the theses, the motivation behind it is forward-looking, in the sense of providing resources that will guide future research. It is instead to provide a succinct formulation of insights that we draw from this literature, and to provide arguments that make clear why each of the theses should be accepted. But it is not our goal to review the literature with an eye towards describing points of agreement or disagreement. However, our theses cover crucial topics such as the definition of mechanisms (thesis 1), the role of models (thesis 2), mechanism discovery (thesis 5), and the use of mechanistic knowledge in scientific explanations (theses 3 and 4) and in other contexts (thesis 6).Īll of these theses have been defended in one form or another by New Mechanist philosophers, and we believe that there is now a significant consensus among mechanistically inclined philosophers on each of these points. While we have endeavored to identify a set of theses that span breadth of recent philosophical research on mechanisms and mechanistic science, we take it as entirely possible that others might argue for additional core results we have missed. To say that they are core results is to say that they summarize what we take to be the most important insights to be gleaned from this dialog. They are achievements that required considerable effort. Let us make clear what we mean by calling these six theses “core results.” To say that they are results is to say that they are theses we have come to know as a consequence of thirty years of research into mechanisms. By making the arguments explicit and presenting them in a systematic way, we consolidate the theses. Additionally, we concisely present arguments for the theses that are scattered and sometimes only implicit. By succinctly formulating these overarching theses, we are able to identify key insights of the New Mechanist program. The insights expressed in the theses have taken some time to emerge, and terminological disputes, as well as some shifts from earlier positions among New Mechanists, have made these points easy to miss.

Given the large literature, we think there is value in distilling what can be learned from this research into a small number of succinct theses. 2000), but many other contemporary philosophers have thought and written about mechanisms and mechanistic science – sometimes, but not always, supportive of, informed by, or in response to, arguments made in these early works. New Mechanism is often associated with the authors of a few works from the 1990s who drew attention to the centrality of the search for mechanisms in the scientific enterprise (Bechtel and Richardson 1993 Glennan 1996 Machamer et al. The term “New Mechanism” (Craver and Tabery 2019 Craver and Krickel 2019 Glennan and Illari 2018b) has proved a convenient label to refer to this research, which has emerged over the last 30 + years, but, like any philosophical ism, it can be hard to pin down. In this paper we identify six theses that constitute core results of philosophical investigation into the nature of mechanisms and of the role that the search for and identification of mechanisms play in the sciences.

Amy goldber mechanistic models of social processes