Lena Kästner (HU Berlin/Saarbrücken): "How to Create a Mechanism Mosaic?"

Integration is a grand challenge for many contemporary research endeavors. Although mechanistic explanations capitalize on a multi-level approach to explanation, it is often unclear how exactly different mechanistic explanations might be fitted into a coherent "mechanism mosaic" (Craver 2007). To achieve this, I argue, we must recognize that there exist different explanatory projects depending on the kind of explanandum of a mechanistic explanation: to explain how an end product or result is generated, scientists will usually search for mechanism that produced it; to explain a process, they will typically search for the mechanism underlying it; and to explain how a system’s stable state or continuous behavior is maintained, they search for the mechanism maintaining it. Recognizing these different projects and understanding their connections provides a backdrop for creating a mechanism mosaic and thus paths the way for explanatory integration.