Mechanism, autonomy and biological explanation

Abstract

The new mechanists and the autonomy approach both aim to account for how biological phenomena are explained. One identifies appeals to how components of a mechanism are organized so that their activities produce a phenomenon. The other directs attention towards the whole organism and focuses on how it achieves self-maintenance. This paper discusses challenges each confronts and how each could benefit from collaboration with the other: the new mechanistic framework can gain by taking into account what happens outside individual mechanisms, while the autonomy approach can ground itself in biological research into how the actual components constituting an autonomous system interact and contribute in different ways to realize and maintain the system. To press the case that these two traditions should be constructively integrated we describe how three recent developments in the autonomy tradition together provide a bridge between the two traditions: (1) a framework of work and constraints, (2) a conception of function grounded in the organization of an autonomous system, and (3) a focus on control.

Control mechanisms: Explaining the integration and versatility of biological organisms

“…As we have argued previously (Bich & Bechtel, 2021), control mechanisms provide a bridge for relating the understanding of organisms provided by the mechanist tradition and by autonomy theorists. Many of the mechanisms constituting an organism carry out specific productive tasks that are required for an organism to build, maintain, and repair itself.…”

“…However, it has not received much philosophical attention. 1 In previous work, we have argued that control provides a constructive bridge between two philosophical traditions in philosophy of biology—new mechanists and autonomy approaches (Bich & Bechtel, 2021). The new mechanists have characterized mechanistic explanations that biologists in fields such as cell and molecular biology frequently advance to explain phenomena such as protein synthesis or production of ATP (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2005; Glennan, 2017; Machamer et al, 2000) and have analyzed the strategies biologists employ in advancing such explanations (Bechtel & Richardson, 1993/2010; Craver & Darden, 2013).…”

We need to explain subjective experience, but its explanation may not be mechanistic

“…In biology, successful explanations often crystallize as mechanisms (65,66). A mechanism contains different parts that perform different operations in order to continuously, causally and sufficiently produce the phenomena associated with such a mechanism (67). In this line, one needs to uniquely define the components and their interactions: the more details, the better.…”

“…By contrast, there are also biological explanations that emphasize the self-organization of components and processes required to construct, repair, and reproduce an autonomous organism as an operationally closed network of constraints, i.e. "autonomy-based explanations" (67,70). In this second type of explanation, a goal is to understand how mechanisms "are produced and controlled in the organism so that they operate as needed to maintain the organism" ((67), p. 52).…”

“…For instance, models such as radical embodiment and the enactive approach demand autonomy-based explanations (71). These types of explanations are complementary and alternative to mechanistic ones (66,67), and much more akin to the program of (neuro)phenomenology (16,20)) (Figure 1C).…”