EPHEMERAL MECHANISMS IN NATURAL AND HUMAN

HISTORYStuart Glennan

Butler UniversitySeptember 2010

Talk Outline

Terminological Questions: What is

history?

A Selective Survey of Models of

Explanation – their Problems and

Prospects

Ephemeral Mechanisms

Contingency in Biology and Human

History

Talk Outline

Terminological Questions: What is

history?

A Selective Survey of Models of

Explanation – their Problems and

Prospects

Ephemeral Mechanisms

Contingency in Biology and Human

History

A Taxonomy of Explanatory Questions

Natural Sciences Human Sciences

Historical Questions

Natural History-What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the cretaceous period?-What caused the creation of Jupiter’s moons?

Human History-What role did Christianity play in the fall of the Roman Empire?-What caused hyper-inflation in Germany in the 1920s?

Ahistorical Questions

Ahistorical Natural Science-How does the action potential work?- What reactions are involved in combustion?

Ahistorical Human/Social Science-What are the causes of religious belief?-What explains the creation and bursting of financial bubbles?

Naturalism vs. Anti-Naturalism

Naturalism - the view that social phenomena are susceptible to the same sort of (causal) explanations as natural phenomena. Social phenomena are a species of natural phenomena.

Anti-Naturalism - the view that social phenomena are of a different kind than natural phenomena, and that explanation of such phenomena require a special method of interpretation (Verstehen).

Talk Outline

Terminological Questions: What is

history?

A Selective Survey of Models of

Explanation – their Problems and

Prospects

Ephemeral Mechanisms

Contingency in Biology and Human

History

The Covering Law Approach(Hempel)

Explanations are arguments:L1, L2,…, Ln, C1, C2,…, Cm, E

Explanations essentially involve laws (deterministic or stochastic)

In theory the explanandum E can be either a singular statement or a general law, but there are problems with the general case

Hempel (1942) argues that human-historical explanations should, in principle have this form.

Issues for the Covering Law Approach

There is no good account of how to distinguish laws from non-lawful generalizations.

Many singular explanations do not appear to invoke laws

Counterexamples to the covering law model suggest that the DN model fails to capture causal/explanatory relevance.

The Causal Nexus Approach(Salmon, Railton, Dowe)

Explananda are singular events An event is explained by locating it within

the causal nexus –a vast network of intersecting causal processes

Explanations don’tobviously depend upon laws

Issues for the Causal Nexus Approach

The definition of a causal interaction is problematic

The account tends towards a reductionist/physics-oriented approach to explanation.

There is no account of the explanation of general phenomena

There is not a good account of proper explanatory grain

The approach apparently fails to capture the concept of a causally relevant property

The Narrative Approach(Danto, Richards)

The dominant explanatory approach among historians.

Explananda are singular events

Narratives are multi-stranded temporally organized sequences of causally related events - like the causal nexus approach

Issues for the Narrative Approach

Like the causal nexus account, the definition of a causal interaction is problematic

Like the causal nexus approach, there is no account of the explanation of general phenomena

Like the causal nexus approach, there is not a good account of causally relevant properties and proper explanatory grain

The Mechanistic Systems Approach

(Bechtel, Craver, Darden, Glennan, Machamer, Thagard)

What is a mechanism?

A mechanism for a behavior is a 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

The Mechanista Consensus

Mechanisms are systems -- collections of entities (parts, components) that act and interact

Mechanisms and their parts are individuated in light of a specification of the mechanism’s behavior

Mechanisms do not behave according to strict laws, but their behavior is typically regular and robust

The Mechanistic Systems Approach to Explanation

Explananda are patterns of behavior (or phenomena) rather than single events.

These patterns of behavior can be characterized by robust and invariant generalizations that are akin to laws

Explanation typically involves construction of a model that applies to a type of mechanism rather than a specific token.

Talk Outline

Terminological Questions: What is

history?

A Selective Survey of Models of

Explanation – their Problems and

Prospects

Ephemeral Mechanisms

Contingency in Biology and Human

History

Mechanical Systems vs. Mechanical Processes

Mechanical systems are: Aggregated entities that have a stable

spatial or functional organization over time.

Mechanical processes: Sequences of events in a particular

region of space-time. The operation of mechanisms qua

systems give rise to mechanisms

a bf

c dg

e

System Diagram

s

and

Process Diagram

s

Ephemeral Mechanisms

An Ephemeral Mechanism is a mechanism where:

1. the configuration of parts is the product of chance or exogenous factors

2. the configuration of parts is short-lived and non-stable

3. The configuration of parts is not an instance of a multiply-realized type.

Ephemeral Mechanisms as Narratives

Robust Parts (as objects) provide the characters in the narrative.

Change-relating generalizations provide causal links between elements in the causal chain.

Narratives are thus singular, but have a kind of counterfactual generality

Talk Outline

Terminological Questions: What is

history?

A Selective Survey of Models of

Explanation – their Problems and

Prospects

Ephemeral Mechanisms

Contingency in Biology and Human

History

Views of Human History

Thomas Carlyle Karl Marx

Views of Natural History (I)

Views of Human History (II)

The Right Answer…Necessity & Contingency