title: Can mechanistic explanation be reconciled with scale-free constitution and dynamics?
abstract: This paper considers two objections to explanations that appeal to mechanisms to explain biological phenomena. Marom argues that the time-scale on which many phenomena occur is scale-free. There is also reason to suspect that the network of interacting entities is scale-free. The result is that mechanisms do not have well-delineated boundaries in nature. I argue that bounded mechanisms should be viewed as entities scientists posit in advancing scientific hypotheses. In positing such entities, scientists idealize. Such idealizations can be highly productive in developing and improving scientific explanations even if the hypothesized mechanisms never precisely correspond to bounded entities in nature. Mechanistic explanations can be reconciled with scale-free constitution and dynamics even if mechanisms as bounded entities don't exist.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, Center for Circadian Biology, and Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, United States. Electronic address: Bechtel@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Bechtel
mesh_terms: D008954:Models, Biological; D012586:Science / Q000379:methods*; D049490:Systems Biology
keywords: Idealization and abstraction; Mechanistic explanation; Scale-free dynamics; Scale-free small world networks