ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most striking thing you notice when thumbing through the pages of a neuroscience textbook like Principles of Neural Science (Kandel et al. 2012) are the elaborate diagrams of the central nervous system, brain, spinal cord, synapses, neurons, and molecules. It is equally striking that whatever topic you look at, whether the action potential, synaptic transmission, cognition, or perception, it is inevitably described and explained using the word “mechanism.” You can become so accustomed to seeing and hearing about mechanisms in neuroscience that it never occurs to you to question what mechanisms in fact are, or what that choice of terminology implies. As it turns out, there are tricky philosophical problems lurking beneath the surface of mechanism talk in neuroscience.
