Explanation: a mechanist alternative.
By William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen. 2005
1,044 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, History and Philosophy of Science, Molecular Biology
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Carlos A. Zednik
- Carl F. Craver
- R. A. Jackson
- Finale Doshi-Velez
- Been Kim
- Stefano Canali
- Cory D. Wright
- C. Hmelo‐Silver
In History and Philosophy of Science
- Carlos A. Zednik
- Cory D. Wright
- Carl F. Craver
- R. A. Jackson
- Finale Doshi-Velez
- William Bechtel
- Been Kim
- Stefano Canali
In Molecular Biology
- Carlos A. Zednik
- Been Kim
- Carl F. Craver
- Cory D. Wright
- R. A. Jackson
- Finale Doshi-Velez
- William Bechtel
- Stefano Canali
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): “…and causal accounts rather than ones based purely on correlations (Ahn, 1998; Anh and Kalish, 2000; Ahn, Kalish, Medin, and Gelman, 1995; Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 2005; Croskerry, 2009; De Kleer and Brown, 2014; Glennan, 2002; Hegarty, 2004; Hoffman, Klein, and Miller, 2011; Klein, et…”
- Making classroom assessment more accountable to scientific reasoning: A case for attending to mechanistic thinking (2009, background): “…scientific practice suggest the importance of mechanistic explanations, the notion of “mechanism” has been refined and extended since the time of Newton to more accurately capture the work of current scientists (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2005; Glennan, 1996; Salmon, 1978; Tabery, 2004; Thagard, 1998).”
- The Nature of Dynamical Explanation* (2011, background): “…is not always feasible; scientists frequently have to find more roundabout ways of showing that a given collection of operations is actually realized in the system from which the target phenomenon arises (for discussion, see Bechtel and Richardson 1993; Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005; Craver 2007).”
- Mechanisms and psychological explanation (2007, background): “(1993, p. 17; see also Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2005, p. 423 )”
- Big Data, epistemology and causality: Knowledge in and knowledge out in EXPOsOMICS (2016, background): “As for biomedical sciences in particular, while philosophers have vastly argued that causal and mechanist knowledge plays a crucial epistemological role (see e.g. Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 2005), it is not clear whether this is still the case in Big Data science.”
- Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness (2016, neutral): “[2000]), (Glennan [2002]), and (Bechtel and Abrahamsen [2005]). Craver ([2007a], p.”
- “Explain” in scientific discourse (2013, neutral): “…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).”
- The Explanatory Force of Dynamical and Mathematical Models in Neuroscience: A Mechanistic Perspective* (2011, background): “Mechanists think such demands are ill fit to the explanatory domains of physiological and biological sciences (Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005), and they doubt that such corrections can be made to predictivism without ultimately adopting some form of the mechanistic framework (Craver 2007).”