William Bechtel I am  Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and a faculty member in the interdisciplinary programs in Science Studies and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience has just been released by Routledge/Taylor and Francis

As a philosopher of science, my research explores issues in the philosophy of the life sciences, including cell biology, biochemistry, neuroscience, and cognitive science. I am particularly excited about the project of constructing a mechanistic philosophy of science, which takes the view that phenomena are often explained by specifying mechanisms. This is in accord with how life scientists actually work, but contrasts with the assumption in traditional philosophy of science that explanation involves deduction from laws. On my analysis, a mechanistic model specifies a decomposition of a phenomenon in terms of component operations localized in component parts of a mechanism. The orchestrated activity of a mechanism often reflects complex, non-linear organization of its components.

Mechanistic explanations are reductive insofar as they decompose a system into component parts and operations to explain its behavior. But insofar as the phenomenon of interest arises only when the mechanism is appropriately organized and is operating under appropriate environmental conditions, mechanistic explanation but also take these higher-level factors into account. This has led me to claim that mechanistic explanation provides for both reduction and the autonomy of higher-level inquiries.

A second focus of my research is how scientists discover and reason about mechanisms. For example, scientists often rely on figures and diagrams. I am currently exploring the nature of such reasoning and how it differs from the sorts of reasoning with linguistic representations for which canons of logic have been articulated. I am also examining problems raised by scientists’ reliance on research instruments and techniques for identifying component parts, their operations, and their organization. New instruments and techniques are prone to produce artifacts, and a challenge for scientists is to distinguish artifacts from genuine findings. Since it is often not well understood how instruments and techniques themselves work at the time they are invoked in science, the criteria scientists employ to evaluate them are necessarily indirect. I have argued that one criterion is whether the results fit plausible mechanistic models of the phenomenon.

Third, scientific investigation typically occurs within the context of institutions and communities. Professional societies and journals do not just happen—they require constructive effort by scientists. They often are the result of deliberation by scientists about the kind of research they endorse and what types of colleagues they want to associate with. These institutions, however, also help define the opportunities for career development by scientists. I have examined how research at the intersection of established disciplines gives rise to new institutions.

My approach to these issues in philosophy of science is naturalistic. I appeal to the actual practice of science, particularly as observed in its history, to answer such questions as what counts as a mechanistic explanation, how new techniques are developed to investigate them, and the role institutions play in shaping investigations. Much of my work over the past two decades focused on the creation of modern cell biology in the mid-twentieth century. New techniques such as cell fractionation and electron microscopy enabled the decomposition of the cytoplasm of cells into component organelles and their operations. The main results of this investigation appeared in Discovering Cell Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

I have also been engaged in an examination of the development of cognitive science, neuroscience, and cognitive neuroscience in the 20th century. Cognitive neuroscience emerged in the last 15 years of the 20th century when new imaging techniques (PET, fMRI) as well as new modeling techniques (neural networks) made it possible to develop neurally-grounded mechanistic models of cognition. I discuss the development of mechanistic models of mental processes (including research in neuroscience and psychology from the 19th and 20th centuries but emphasizing recent cognitive neuroscience) in Mental Mechanisms (Routledge, 2008).

A major concern of my recent work is with the types of organization and dynamics involved in living systems which must maintain themselves in states far from thermodynamic equilibrium. As a result of this requirement, living systems, unlike humanly-engineered mechanisms, are inherently active systems and involve complex non-linear interaction of components. The various mechanisms for maintaining circadian rhythms in different life forms provide rich examples of such mechanisms and are increasingly are the focus of my research.

 

In March-April 2003 I presented the Cardinal Mercier Lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain. These lectures, entitled Philosophy Engages Cognitive Neuroscience, focused on the implications of adopting a naturalistic and mechanistic perspective on the mind/brain. Drafts of the lectures are available. Revised and augmented versions of these lectures appear in Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience (Routledge, 2008)

I directed a project initially funded by the Fund for the Improvement of PostSecondary Education (FIPSE) that generated a modular interactive webtexts for teaching. The initial focus of the project was a interdisciplinary research methods course for cognitive science majors, but I extended it into a more general course on scientific reasoing. The course materials for the cognitive science research methods course are available at the Inquiry website at Washington University. Those for the scientific reasoning course are available at the UCSD Inquiry Website. To access more than the sample site, please send me email.

I am editor of Philosophical Psychology, email:pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu, an interdisciplinary journal focusing on foundational issues in psychology, especially experimental cognitive psychology.

Together with George Graham, I edited A Companion to Cognitive Science, a one volume overview of cognitive science, published in July 1998 by Basil Blackwell.   An expanded set of Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science is available on this site.

Together with current and former graduate students Pete Mandik, Jennifer Mundale, and Robert Stufflebeam, I edited Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader, published by Basil Blackwell.