ABSTRACT
Scientists are prolific purveyors of diagrams and other visual representations. Their publications are replete with them; their lab meetings are organized around them. With the mechanistic turn in philosophy of science, many of the New Mechanists and Social Scientific Mechanists assembled in this handbook under the broad “minimal mechanism” umbrella (Chapter 1; Illari and Williamson 2012; Glennan in press) have incorporated some of these as figures within their otherwise text-heavy case studies. Several have devised their own diagrams as well, to help make sense of the science (see Chapters 9, 13, and 14). Our own chapter therefore could have aimed to explore the visualizations used in the physical sciences, social sciences, and philosophy of science in all of their diversity. Instead, we have chosen to focus on the one type of visual representation that most directly captures the machine metaphor at the heart of the researchers’ endeavor, which we call mechanism diagrams. These have deep historical roots (which are unearthed as far back as Descartes’ biology; see Chapter 3).
