What Is a Mechanism? A Counterfactual Account

By James F. Woodward. Philosophia Scientiæ, 2002

317 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7bdaa9ca33939dd139c7b2c8676305a6f4f0d1fd

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In History and Philosophy of Science

Citations in the corpus

A Functional Account of Causation; or, A Defense of the Legitimacy of Causal Thinking by Reference to the Only Standard That Matters—Usefulness (as Opposed to Metaphysics or Agreement with Intuitive Judgment) (2014, background): “…have noted, so-called causation by double prevention is quite common (and important) in many biological contexts—for example, many cases of genetic regulation work by double prevention, including the classic lac operon model of lactose synthesis devised by Jacob and Monod (see Woodward 2002).”
Constitutive Explanatory Relevance (2007, background): “Stuart Glennan (2002) argues, picking up on a suggestion from Woodward (2002), that the etiological relevance of one property or component of a mechanism to another can be understood usefully (although not reductively) in terms of the ability to manipulate one component by intervening on another.”
Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generation (2019, background): “unterfactual conditions. This is necessary to accurately reason about the new consequences with minimal edits to the original sequence of events, instead of being confounded by spurious correlations (Woodward, 2002;Bottou,2019). Therefore, a key measure of the task besides consistency is that the re”
Singular and General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective (2011, background): “…each component are also independently changeable, and where (iv) the representation allows us to see how, in virtue of (i), (ii) and (iii), the overall output of the mechanism will vary under manipulation of the input to each component and changes in the components themselves (Woodward 2002: S375).”
Three Problems for the Mutual Manipulability Account of Constitutive Relevance in Mechanisms (2012, background): “(I4w) I is (statistically) independent of any variable Z that causes and that is on a directed path that does not go through (adapted from Woodward [2003], p.”