ABSTRACT
The term “mechanism” has been used widely in the life sciences at least since the seventeenth century. Embodied in the “mechanical philosophy” of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), René Descartes (1596–1650), and Robert Boyle (1627–91), among many others, it came to dominate both the epistemology and ontology of virtually all modern western science (Durbin, 1988). In this sense “Mechanism” refers to a world-view or philosophical system that sees nature from a materialist perspective and to varying degrees, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, marked with analogies to machines or machine-like processes. It is also still referred to as the “mechanical philosophy” or “metaphysical Mechanism,” since it is “concerned with questions about the constituents and organization of the natural world” (Glennan and Illari, Chapter 1, this volume). However, as philosophers of science know, the term “mechanism” has a second, related, and overlapping meaning designated as operative or explanatory mechanism (hereafter, “operative mechanism”).
