William Wimsatt
Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago

Mechanisms, Stability, and Contingent Order: Exploring the Domain and limits of Mechanistic Explanation

This paper divides into two parts: historical review and new work. I review some of the character of and motivations for early work on mechanistic explanation and levels of organization in biology, particularly aspects of the work of Kauffman, (early) Salmon, Schaffner, and Simon that influenced my own account, then analyze how they diverged from then dominant philosophical views emphasizing laws, capacities, or dispositional properties. I then compare my analysis with the later work of Cartwright for similarities and differences, and urge mechanisms over capacities in compositional domains. But it is not always possible to find mechanisms, even for a committed materialist, in sufficiently complex and irregular systems. I will go on to explore the limits of mechanistic explanation in richly connected causal networks, and relate my analysis to that of Stuart Glennan on "ephemeral mechanisms", emphasizing the conjoint use of robustness and generative entrenchment to find stabler structures and processes in historical explanations in biology and human cultural history.