ABSTRACT
A mechanism is always a mechanism for a phenomenon. The phenomenon that a mechanism serves is not somehow incidental to that mechanism, but constitutive of it: mechanisms are identified, and individuated, by the phenomena they produce. Thus, we can ask about mechanisms for blood clots, or demand-pull inflation, or social cohesion in naked mole rats. But it does not make sense to ask, “how many mechanisms are in the human body?” or even, “is the universe a mechanism?” These latter two questions are nonsensical because they do not specify a relevant phenomenon. That each mechanism has a phenomenon has become a platitude in the new mechanism literature in the philosophy of science (e.g., Glennan 1996, 52; Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005, 423; Craver 2007, 122; Darden 2008, 960; Craver and Darden 2013, 52)—though as it turns out, there are different ways in which a mechanism “has” its phenomenon.
