Towards the Methodological Turn in the Philosophy of Science - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 4

development of “mechanical philosophy,” represented by the achievements of the
giants of science such as Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Boyle, and Newton. Marie
Boas's ( 1952 ) seminal article on the establishment of the mechanical philosophy
identifies the rise of the mechanical philosophy as due to the development of new
the science of mechanism that replaced Aristotelian physics and thus concludes that
explanations for the properties of bodies should be based on it (Boas 1952 , p. 414).
In the contemporary philosophy of science, the first half of the twentieth century
also witnessed mechanistic explanations developed in philosophy of science when
the discussion was centered on the mechanics and physics (e.g., Nagel 1961 ). The
resurgence of the importance of mechanisms in recent studies in the philosophy of
science, however, is not because its application would reduce explanations in other
sciences to mechanics and physics (e.g., Nagel's 1961 attempt to reduce biology),
but because of its involvement in how scientists actually explain. A number of
philosophical characterizations of mechanisms have been recently put forward
(Tabery 2004 ; Skipper and Millstein 2005 ). Most of them are inspired by biology.
Among them, the two most salient accounts are developed by Peter Machamer,
Lindley Darden, and Carl Craver ( 2000 )—hereafter, MDC—and by Stuart Glennan
( 1996 , 2002 ). Glennan's interactionist account evolves hand in hand with the
literature of causality. His recent definition adopts James Woodward's ( 2003 )
interventionist account of causality. In contrast, MDC endeavor to give up causal
language entirely.
Briefly, Woodward's view is that “ X is a total cause of Y if and only if under an
intervention that changes the value of X (with no other intervention occurring) there
is an associated change in the value of Y ” (Woodward 2007 , p. 73). More specifi-
cally, Woodward clarifies the relationship among the concepts of manipulation, the
change-relating property of a relation, and invariance. Inspired by Douglas
Gasking's idea that a causal relation is a “means-end” or “producing-by-means-
of” relation (Gasking 1955 ), Woodward refines this causal idea by adding a
condition of invariance. According to Gasking, C causes E in cases in which we
can, with the aid of a certain kind of general manipulative technique, produce an
antecedent occurrence of kind C as a means to bring about a subsequent occurrence
of kind E . As with Gasking, Woodward agrees that a relation, if it is to be regarded
as having causal and explanatory import, must be explicated in terms of manipula-
tion. What is new in Woodward's account is that he further suggests that, for a
relation R between C and E to count as being causal and explanatory, relation R
must be invariant under the manipulation of C . That is, the manipulated change in C
should bring about the change in E in the way stated in R ; otherwise, C does not
cause E in the way stated in R and perhaps does not cause E at all. Clearly, for
Woodward, a causal relation should be a relation that is exploitable by manipulation
for the purposes of control. Woodward's account seems to imply that a relation R
will express a causal relation only if R is invariant over a range of interventions.
Accordingly, Glennan ( 2002 , p. S344) recently offered the following definition:
“A mechanism for a behavior is a complex system that produces that behavior by
the interaction of a number of parts, where the interactions between parts can be
characterized by direct, invariant, change-relating generalizations” (Glennan 2002 ,