ABSTRACT
Genetics, cell biology, and molecular biology offered to philosophers of science sufficient examples to challenge the logical empiricist view on scientific inquiry as a search for laws of nature and scientific explanation as subsumption of phenomena under laws. Those areas of biology indicated instead that scientific inquiry is a search for mechanisms and explanation is a matter of describing them (see Chapters 1 and 23). The resulting new mechanistic philosophy of science offered various accounts of mechanisms whose common assumptions are articulated by this formulation of a minimal mechanism: “A mechanism for a phenomenon consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (see Chapter 1).
