Thinking about Mechanisms

By P. Machamer, Lindley Darden, Carl F. Craver. 2000

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Human-AI Systems: A Literature Meta-Review, Synopsis of Key Ideas and Publications, and Bibliography for Explainable AI (2019, background): “In the fields of AI and philosophy of science, problem diagnosis, causal explanation, scientific discovery, and explanation are regarded as highly related or even overlapping (e.g., Darden, Machamer, and Crave, 2000; Overton, 2013; Shank, 1986).”
Explanation in Biology: Reduction, Pluralism, and Explanatory Aims (2011, background): “A mechanism includes several entities, often different kinds of entities, and their causal interactions, such as mechanical or chemical interactions (Machamer et al. 2000).”
Doing without Concepts (2009, background): “Criticizing a short exposition of the ideas developed in this book (Machery 2005), Piccinini and Scott (2006) have defended the plausibility of Scope Pluralism.”
Effective connectivity: Influence, causality and biophysical modeling (2011, unknown): “Ideally these edges can be given a mechanistic interpretation (Machamer et al., 2000).”
Recognizing mechanistic reasoning in student scientific inquiry: A framework for discourse analysis developed from philosophy of science (2008, background): “Piaget (1927) interviewed young children on phenomena ranging from air to bicycles and documented 17 different types of causality in children’s explanations. Although he finds them all identifying causes for effects, only the most sophisticated are termed “mechanistic” in that they remove the influe”
Depth and deference: When and why we attribute understanding (2016, background): “In fact, depth does play a large evaluative role in many theories of explanation, as it is presupposed by the mechanistic accounts that demand complete productive intelligibility (Machamer et al. 2000) and those that rate accuracy in terms of grain of description (Weiskopf 2011).”
Causal logics and mechanisms in policy design: How and why adopting a mechanistic perspective can improve policy design (2019, background): “…‘theoretical propositions about causal tendencies’ (Hedström, 2005: 108) and thus middle range theories (Mayntz, 2004; Pawson, 2000), are sets of entities and activities organised to produce a regular series of changes from a beginning state to an end one (Darden, 2006; Machamer et al., 2000).”
Identifying Essential Epistemic Heuristics for Guiding Mechanistic Reasoning in Science Learning (2018, background): “…stages, from input to output, of the underlying causal events leading to a phenomenon; and (b) how and why one or more factors behave to give rise to a phenomenon (Louca, Zacharia, & Constantinou, 2011; Machamer et al., 2000; Perkins & Grotzer, 2000; Russ et al., 2008; Springer & Keil, 1991).”
Can we believe the DAGs? A comment on the relationship between causal DAGs and mechanisms (2014, background): “An alternative to the intervention-based, or counterfactual approach to causality, is a mechanistic view.(18) One approach to thinking about mechanisms would be to make mathematical models akin to those known from physics, a natural tool being that of differential equations.”
Predicting the Past from Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory and its Distinction from Imagination and Preservation (2020, background): “…according to the standard view – is individuated solely by its components, their activities and their regular interactions with each other (Craver 2009; Machamer et al. 2000), and not in terms of representational content or the aim to approximate truth.16 We can summarize that consequence as…”
Explanation: a mechanist alternative. (2005, background): “Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000) refer to the simplified account as a sketch of a mechanism.”
The Instrumental Value of Explanations (2011, background): “In line with approaches to explanation that emphasize causation and causal mechanisms (e.g., Salmon 1984; Machamer et al. 2000), engaging in explanation can also promote the discovery of causal structure.”
Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches (2011, background): “Descriptions of mechanisms—mechanism schemas (Machamer et al. 2000) or models (Glennan 2005; Craver 2006)—can be more or less complete.”
Causality, mediation and time: a dynamic viewpoint (2012, background): “The other point of view focuses on mechanisms; one wishes to understand how the effects come about (Machamer et al., 2000).”
“Explain” in scientific discourse (2013, unknown): “…james@overton.ca (Friedman 1974; Kitcher 1989), pragmatic (van Fraassen 1980), causal-mechanical (Salmon 1984; Dowe 2000), interventionist (Woodward 2003), mechanistic (Machamer et al. 2000; Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005), asymptotic (Batterman 2002), and model-based explanations (Bokulich 2009).”
Achieving Alignment of Perspectival Framings in Problem-Solving Discourse (2012, methodology): “We believe that this model of a process of reaching mutual understanding is an example of mechanistic explanation as it has been discussed by Bechtel (2007), Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000), and others.”