The Bechtel Approach to the Scope and Limits of Mechanistic Explanation

A huge amount of debate has centered around the “scope and limits” of mechanistic explanation. Critics of mechanism often accuse the mechanistic program of being hegemonic: their strategy is to find genuinely explanatory models that are not (or at least not obviously) mechanistic, and they argue that proponents of mechanism can only incorporate them at the risk of trivializing their thesis. In this paper, I argue that Bechtel’s approach to mechanism is a kind of integrative pluralism, and hence that it is immune from criticisms of this sort. An integrative pluralist thinks that multiple models are required for a given explanandum, but that it is a norm to integrate them in giving explanations. I show how this view avoids both an overly hegemonic approach to mechanistic explanation and criticisms based on limiting mechanism’s scope.