Looking down, around, and up: Mechanistic explanation in psychology

Abstract

Accounts of mechanistic explanation have emphasized the importance of looking downdecomposing a mechanism into its parts and operations. Using research on visual processing as an exemplar, I illustrate how productive such research has been. But once multiple components of a mechanism have been identified, researchers also need to figure out how it is organized-they must look around and determine how to recompose the mechanism. Although researchers often begin by trying to recompose the mechanism in terms of sequential operations, they frequently find that the components of a mechanism interact in complex ways involving positive and negative feedback and that the organization often exhibits highly interactive local networks linked by a few long-range connections (small-worlds organization) and power law distributions of connections. The mechanisms are themselves active systems that are perturbed by inputs but not set in motion by them. Researchers also need to look up-situate a mechanism in its context, which may be a larger mechanism that modulates its behavior. When looking down is combined with looking around and up, mechanistic research results in an integrated, multi-level perspective.

One mechanism, many models: a distributed theory of mechanistic explanation

“…Yet, any individual model of a mechanism will only be informative as to its behaviour under those specific conditions. Thus we often must rely on different models which characterize the mechanism under varying conditions in order to gain a sufficient understanding of its workings (see : Bechtel 2008, p. 22;Bechtel 2009). …”

Situatedness and Embodiment of Computational Systems

“…The mechanistic account of explanation has drawn insight from scientific practice, and it has long stressed that mechanisms, which cannot be thought of as purely reactive systems, remain subject to modulation from the environment [74]. For this reason, the explanation has to include both the internal organization of the mechanism in question and the dependence of the behavior of mechanisms on the environmental regularities.…”

Social intelligence: How to integrate research? A mechanistic perspective

“…The new mechanism frames the discovery of explanatorily relevant mechanisms for the mechanism under study in terms of looking up, down and around (Bechtel 2009). For example, Craver and Darden write:…”