The philosophical conception of mechanistic explanation is grounded on a limited number of
canonical examples. These examples provide an overly narrow view of contemporary …

Mechanistic explanations have proved to provide a powerful account of both the practices of
biologists and the normative constraints on explanation. This chapter examines the …

Mechanistic explanations appeal to the parts, operations, and organizations of mechanisms
to explain the phenomena for which they are responsible. Scientists have developed …

Despite the philosophical clash between deductive-nomological and mechanistic accounts
of explanation, in scientific practice, both approaches are required in order to achieve more …

Accounts of mechanistic explanation, especially as applied to biology and sometimes going
under the heading of “new mechanism,” provided an attractive alternative to nomological …

Causal relations among components and activities are intentionally misrepresented in
mechanistic explanations found routinely across the life sciences. Since several mechanists …

Mechanistic explanations are one of the major types of explanation in biology. The
explanatory force of mechanisms is apparent in such typical cases as the functioning of an …

A task in the philosophy of discovery is to find reasoning strategies for discovery, which fall
into three categories: strategies for generation, evaluation and revision. Because …

Many explanations in molecular biology, neuroscience, and other fields of experimental
biology describe mechanisms underlying phenomena of interest. These mechanistic …

Mechanistic accounts of explanation have recently found popularity within philosophy of
science. Presently, we introduce the idea of an extended mechanistic explanation, which …