What is a mechanism? #2
Description
Psychologists often talk about mechanisms, especially in cognitive neurosciences but also in other areas, so it would be fantastic to add a bit on what we mean with the term mechanism. There are different philosophical stances including the most recent new mechanists who have interesting definitions. Discussing the term mechanisms ultimately brings us back to what the nature of an explanation is. As far as my limited understanding goes, I think that we can differentiate between two view:
the ontic view: a mechanism explains a phenomenon if and only if the mechanism constitutes the phenomenon
the epistemic view: a mechanism is a model/representation that does the explanation if and only if it describes the phenomenon and some further norms are satisfied (utility, predictiveness)
I guess as psychologists we often implicitly go with the epistemic view but other disciplines (like a geneticist or cell biologists) would assume the former. Beate Krikel, a Berlin-based philosopher, wrote a great book on this topic, The Mechanical World, which may be something interesting to discuss in light of this class.