Abstract

Philosophy of science has recently experienced a mechanistic turn: while the received view used to be that scientific explanations conform to the deductivenomological (D-N) model, mechanistic explanations are now up and coming. According to the D-N model, to explain a phenomenon is to subsume it under a law. According the mechanistic view, to explain a phenomenon is to identify the mechanism, and the internal workings thereof, that brings the phenomenon about. The current chapter introduces mechanistic explanations and puts them into a historical as well as an empirical research context.