Brigitte Falkenburg and Gregor Schiemann (Eds.): Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond (European Studies in Phi
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Brigitte Falkenburg and Gregor Schiemann (Eds.): Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond (European Studies in Philosophy of Science) Springer, Dordrecht, 2019, VIII, 220 pp, 103,99€ (Hardcover), ISBN: 978-3-030-10706-2 Veli‑Pekka Parkkinen1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In their introduction to ‘Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond’, the editors state that the main topic of the book is “how current mechanistic explanations in physics and beyond relate to roots of mechanical explanations in early modern science and philosophy” (p. 2). In addition, the editors categorize the individual chapters of the volume under the following three themes: (i) What is the ontological and/or epistemological import of mechanistic explanations, and what is their methodological significance within the practice of science? (ii) How do the causal aspects of mechanisms relate to the laws of physics? (iii) How does theory reduction relate to ontological reduction, to what extent can mechanisms explain the emergence of higher-level phenomena in nature (pp. 2–3)? Accordingly, the eleven contributions to the book are organized under three headings: “Mechanisms in History and Today”, “Mechanisms, Causality, and Multilevel Systems”, and “From Physics to Complexity and Computation”. In what follows, I will not try to comment on every chapter of the book separately. Instead, I will try to highlight general issues that I find interesting or problematic and that arise throughout the book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all the chapters include some exegesis of the “New Mechanistic” philosophy literature, or rely on a definition of mechanism found in this literature. Given the scope and aims of the volume, one obvious question then is to what extent mechanism-concepts in physics—historically and today—resemble the mechanismconcepts the New Mechanists have in mind when offering an account of mechanistic explanation. The chapters in the historical part of the book (by Stathis Psillos and Stavros Ioannidis, Gregor Schiemann, Dennis Dieks, and Brigitte Falkenburg) describe how the old mechanistic philosophy was both shaped by, and used to regiment particular debates in approximately seventeenth century physics. The mechanism-concepts found in contemporary physics obviously originate in today’s physics. But the New Mechanists’ theories have * Veli‑Pekka Parkkinen veli‑[email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
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their roots in analyses of problem-solving strategies of contemporary special sciences like psychology and biology, rather than (philosophy of) physics. The New Mechanists build on literature on functional explanation (Cummins 1975), and analyses of the decomposition/ localization research heuristics prevalent in the life sciences (Bechtel and Richardson 2010; Simon 1962; Wimsatt 2007). From this literature one can extract a notion of mechanism as a componential causal system (Kuorikoski 2009): a system that produces some phenomenon through t
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