Action – as the key to causation – is held to be performed by entities or parts, and, as we will stress below, different sorts of activities can be performed by the parts of a system. Emphasis is put on mechanisms doing something, performing a behavior, reaching a target. Mechanisms are taken to be systems of entities engaged in productive activities, or systems of parts that produce a given behavior by interacting with each other. However, far from running in narrow circles, the definitions provided aim at making explicit interrelations among sets of concepts. To start with, it should be stressed that productivity lies at the core of all these views, which do not aim to provide a reductive account of causation: to produce or to bring about is just to cause, and, in this sense, causation is not traced back to different, separated and in some sense more fundamental concepts. Over and above the differences among these – and other – definitions in the literature, this chapter considers a range of features of mechanisms and related concepts that can help us navigate discussions on what mechanisms are and what mechanistic reasoning is good for in scientific contexts – keeping in mind that causes count here as probabilistically contributing to their effects. 3, 4, and 5, with a focus on more specific medical fields: epidemiology and public health, cancer studies, and psychiatry.Ī mechanism for a phenomenon consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon (Glennan, 2017, p. Further (more and less critical) reflections on the actual adequacy of a mechanistic standpoint in addressing medical issues will be presented in Chaps. 2.2), and the debate on epistemic and ontic stances when discussing mechanistic explanations (Sect. In particular, recent works re-evaluating the notions of process and pathway over that of mechanism (Sect. The rest of the chapter will be devoted to shedding more light on some epistemological aspects of mechanisms, including how different characterizations of mechanisms and mechanistic models can impact the way in which scientific explanations are conceived. Also stressed will be the epistemic advantages in adopting mechanistic notions to explain diseases and why they break out and develop in a given way (Sect. In this chapter, we will start by focusing on some core claims made by a few of the most successful neo-mechanist theories, stressing especially what they have in common, and providing considerations on how they fare when transferred to medical discourse. Even if differences hold between the single neo-mechanist positions, it can be easily agreed that they share some basic tenets. Given the frequency of the term “mechanism” in the health sciences and, as a consequence, the number of philosophical works devoted to its meaning and uses in various medical contexts, we will dedicate quite some space to views and issues related to mechanisms. The general success of the mechanistic account has been such that it has currently become common to talk of “the new mechanical philosophy”. So-called neo-mechanism has enjoyed great fortune ever since, both within philosophy of science and in a range of disciplinary fields where the applicability and adequacy of the notion of mechanism for various epistemic purposes are discussed. Footnote 1 Salmon’s probabilistic mechanism was subsequently criticized, revised and supplanted by the development of mechanistic theories in the late Nineties/beginning of the 2000s. In the philosophical scenario, mechanism has enjoyed a revival since the early Eighties, when it was strongly promoted by Wesley Salmon as a probabilistic approach to causation and causal explanation.
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