Abstract
The Acting Entity-characterization of mechanisms, defended in the last chapter, is rather broad. It allows for almost all causal goings-on to be mechanisms. Let us call the AE-characterization of mechanisms as formulated in the previous chapter the minimal notion of a mechanism (Glennan 2017). In the following sections I introduce a taxonomy of mechanisms that goes beyond the minimal notion. First, I introduce the notion of a functional mechanism: one can distinguish between those mechanisms that fulfill a (biological) function, and those that do not (Garson 2013; Piccinini 2015; Maley and Piccinini 2017). Indeed, combining the notion of a mechanism with that of a function seems to be promising with regard to making sense of the normativity of mechanism-talk: a mechanism that has a certain function is supposed to fulfill that function and might fail to fulfill it. In what follows, I discuss different suggestions for how to characterize functional mechanisms. It will turn out that neither of these notions successfully accounts for the normativity of mechanism-talk unless the second and third sub-types of mechanisms are taken into account. I will call the second type regular mechanism; the third type I will call reversely regular mechanism (Krickel 2018). Both notions rest on the idea that one can distinguish between one-off mechanisms and mechanisms that establish some kind of regularity (Andersen 2012). Regular mechanisms, as I will show, have to be understood as mechanisms that bring about a particular phenomenon more often than they bring about any other phenomenon. Reversely regular mechanisms are mechanisms that bring about a particular phenomenon that is more often brought about by that mechanism than by any other mechanism. I will show how these two notions of regularity together are necessary and sufficient for grounding type-level mechanistic explanations (see also Krickel 2018), and when combined with the functional notion of a mechanism, can solve the problem of accidental goal contributions, which afflicts the most promising account of functions as discussed in the next section.
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- 1.
- 2.
According to Maley and Piccinini (2017), something can have a function with respect to the subjective goals of an organism as well. Only persons or other conscious creatures can have subjective goals. Although persons can contain mechanisms (in the acting entities sense) or act as entities within mechanisms, they are not mechanisms themselves. Hence I will ignore this aspect, since EA-mechanisms do not have subjective goals.
- 3.
Note that by making this statement, I do not want to commit myself to realism about types. Rather, I take types of mechanisms to be descriptions of similarities between mechanism tokens that are formed based on our explanatory interests. To say that a mechanism type is regular is to express something about the tokens that fall under the description. Spelling out what the ‘something’ amounts to is the aim of this and the following section.
- 4.
Note that in cases of etiological explanations we are dealing with causal sequences consisting of the mechanism causing the phenomenon; in constitutive explanations, we are dealing with what might be called constitutive pairs where the mechanism constitutes the phenomenon and they do not literally form a sequence—for the sake of simplicity I will speak of ‘sequences’ in both cases.
- 5.
I presuppose a singularist account of causation and constitution, according to which causation and constitution connect tokens. These relations are prior to the relation of regularity—whether a sequence type is regular depends on the way in which its instances cause or constitute each other. I will argue explicitly for a singularist account of causation in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4, and for a singularist account of constitution in Chap. 7, Sect. 7.5.
- 6.
What exactly does it mean to hold that a type has ‘multiple instances’? For present purposes, it suffices to assume that ‘multiple instances’ means to have more than one instance (the type is not a singular occurrence and it is not merely potentially regular).
- 7.
Thanks to Marshall Abrams for bringing up this idea.
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Krickel, B. (2018). Types of Mechanisms: Ephemeral, Regular, Functional. In: The Mechanical World. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03629-4_3
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