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  1. Organisms Need Mechanisms; Mechanisms Need Organisms.William Bechtel & Leonardo Bich - 2023 - In João L. Cordovil, Gil Santos & Davide Vecchi (eds.), New Mechanism Explanation, Emergence and Reduction. Springer. pp. 85-108.
    According to new mechanists, mechanisms explain how specific biological phenomena are produced. New mechanists have had little to say about how mechanisms relate to the organism in which they reside. A key feature of organisms, emphasized by the autonomy tradition, is that organisms maintain themselves. To do this, they rely on mechanisms. But mechanisms must be controlled so that they produce the phenomena for which they are responsible when and in the manner needed by the organism. To account for how (...)
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  • There Are No Intermediate Stages: An Organizational View on Development.Leonardo Bich & Derek Skillings - 2023 - In Matteo Mossio (ed.), Organization in Biology. Springer. pp. 241-262.
    Theoretical accounts of development exhibit several internal tensions and face multiple challenges. They span from the problem of the identification of the temporal boundaries of development (beginning and end) to the characterization of the distinctive type of change involved compared to other biological processes. They include questions such as the role to ascribe to the environment or what types of biological systems can undergo development and whether they should include colonies or even ecosystems. In this chapter we discuss these conceptual (...)
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  • Coherent Causal Control: A New Distinction within Causation.Marcel Weber - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (4):69.
    The recent literature on causality has seen the introduction of several distinctions within causality, which are thought to be important for understanding the widespread scientific practice of focusing causal explanations on a subset of the factors that are causally relevant for a phenomenon. Concepts used to draw such distinctions include, among others, stability, specificity, proportionality, or actual-difference making. In this contribution, I propose a new distinction that picks out an explanatorily salient class of causes in biological systems. Some select causes (...)
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  • Discovering Autoinhibition as a Design Principle for the Control of Biological Mechanisms.Andrew Bollhagen & William Bechtel - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 95 (C):145-157.
    Autoinhibition is a design principle realized in many molecular mechanisms in biology. After explicating the notion of a design principle and showing that autoinhibition is such a principle, we focus on how researchers discovered instances of autoinhibition, using research establishing the autoinhibition of the molecular motors kinesin and dynein as our case study. Research on kinesin and dynein began in the fashion described in accounts of mechanistic explanation but, once the mechanisms had been discovered, researchers discovered that they exhibited a (...)
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  • Organization needs organization: Understanding integrated control in living organisms.Leonardo Bich & William Bechtel - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93:96-106.
    Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare these two (...)
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