Mechanisms and Laws: Clarifying the Debate - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 138

cs-mechanistic knowledge relies upon knowledge of (c)p-laws (or, more precisely,
mechanistic explanations must involve p-law statements), and if knowledge of
(c)p-laws requires knowledge of cs-mechanisms, then we never reach the epistemic
bottom. It is not clear to us that this is a well-formed problem, and so we are not
clear how to solve it. 10 We know of no foundationalist who proposes to build
scientific knowledge out of the basic building blocks of mechanisms or laws.
Foundationalists tend to construe the epistemic foundation of science in terms of
particular matters of fact, sense data, or innate ideas, not in terms of p-laws or
mechanisms. We think that both p-laws and mechanisms contribute to the advance-
ment of science, and we feel no pressing need (and have been given no compelling
argument) to place one above or below the other in the order of our knowledge.
Furthermore, it is not at all clear from Leuridan's formulation how laws stop the
regress. If one must know p-laws in order to adequately test p-laws (e.g., p-law
statements that one's randomization procedure regularly randomizes, that one's
interventions work the same way each time, and so on), then one still has a regress
of sorts, and Leuridan has not shown how it will come to an end. How can we design
a randomized experiment if we cannot trust that our randomizing procedure gener-
ally randomizes? And how can we control for confounding factors if there are no
general facts about which factors are confounding? How do we know that our
intervention is adequate if there are no general facts about how our intervention
works? It would appear that laws are no more epistemically secure than are
mechanisms in the foundationalist view that Leuridan apparently embraces.
5 Conclusion
For the discussion of these matters to move forward, it is crucial not to manufacture
an artificial conflict between philosophers who emphasize the centrality of
mechanisms in our thinking about science and philosophers (such as Mitchell)
who seek a plausible way to talk about generalization in science. No mechanist
denies that there are pragmatically useful regularities. And nobody who thinks there
are pragmatically useful regularities should feel any pressure to deny that the search
for mechanisms is central to the practice of biology and many other sciences.
It is a surprising fact about the history of the philosophy of science that of these
two correlative concepts, generalizations have tended to dominate the discussion.
Against this backdrop, mechanists should be read as suggesting something of a
gestalt shift in which mechanisms are moved into the foreground. Such a shift leads
attention away from the formal structure of scientific theories (and questions about
the logical structure of law statements and models) and toward the material
structures that scientists endeavor to describe. Attention to such material structures
10 Contrary to Leuridan's claim, Machamer et al. ( 2000 ) discuss bottom-out activities not as a way
of solving some sort of epistemic regress but as a disciplinarily relative way of identifying when
explanations come to an end.