Mechanistic Explanations Generalized: How Far Can We Go?

Abstract

My paper investigates the methodological continuity of mechanistic explanations from early modern science to current scientific practice, focusing on their generalizations in physics and beyond. Mechanistic explanations in early modern science draw on the analogy between processes in nature and the ways in which machines work, and this analogy has remained effective up to the present day. Today’s machines rely on the advanced sciences ranging from quantum physics to computer science, just as the current generalizations of mechanistic explanations do. I will show how these generalizations fit in with a general mechanistic methodology of the “dissecting” sciences, from its origins in early modern science (in particular, Newton’s analytic-synthetic method), to the constituent models of matter based on quantum theory, and the top-down and bottom-up approaches of the follower sciences of physics, such as current neuroscience. All these approaches have in common that they explain higher-level phenomena in terms of lower-level components and causes. I will discuss them under methodological and ontological aspects, compare some examples from current physical practice with the recent discussion on the “new mechanical philosophy”, and sketch the scope and the limitations of a generalized mechanistic methodology.

We have to change our mechanistic view from the crude atomism that recognizes only the motions of material particles in the void to a conception that admits such nonmaterial entities as fields, but for all of that, it is still a mechanistic world view. Materialism is untenable, but the mechanical philosophy, I believe, remains viable.

(Salmon 1984, 241)

I would like to thank Stuart Glennan for helpful comments and Joshua Rosaler for language corrections.