MEANINGS OF 'MECHANISM' Copyright Val Dusek Philosophy Dept. U of New Hampshire Durham NH 03824 USA Vald usek@aol.

com The term 'mechanism,' like that of other scientific programmatic or phil osophical terms, has been used in a variety of ways. The Greek term mhcanh meant "machine." In Shakespeare's time the "rude meckanicals" were craftspeople, an d mechanism was associated with "mechanics" in the practical sense, as it is us ed in speaking of "automobile mechanics." Philosopher of science Clark Glymour says that he tells his wife's Oklahoma family that he is an "auto mechanic" rat her than an academic, thus playing on two meanings of the term mechanics. The hosts of the radio talk show "Car Talk" joke about need for a "quantum mechanic, " and the philosopher of science Paul Teller appeared at an academic conference wearing a T-shirt saying "Quantum Mechanic", punning on the automotive and physi cal uses of the term mechanics. By contrast, in the rhetoric of the German humanities and social science s, mechanism was associated with atomism, with fragmentation and with materialis m. Mechanical approaches to theory--biological, psychological, and social--were associated with the rise of technology and were seen as threatening and dehuman izing). They were contrasted with holistic, synthetic and more benign theories. Fritz Ringer in The Decline of the Geerman Mandarins documents the extent to w hich German academics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contrasted mechanical with holistic approaches and "linked commerce wi th commercialism, machines with mechanistic conceptions, and the new economic or ganization with rationalism and utilitarianism." There is a traditional association of "mechanical" with machine, meaning literally one of pulleys, levers, and such. However, this sense of "machine" w as later extended metaphorically to apply to the physical world in accounts of " the world machine" or the "clockwork universe." Descartes spoke of animals as m achines, the machina carnis (or, in the less elegant sounding English of the art ificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, a "meat machine."), or for the eigh teenth century writer La Mettrie to title a work Man a Machine. The concept of machine has been generalized from the traditional construction of gears and whe els to the electronic computer as machine, to refer to the "virtual machine" of the conceptual design of a computer, and the abstract, formal "Turing machine." One can get a sense of meanings of "mechanism" or "mechanistic" that are associated with atoms, by noting the historical contrasts of "mechanism" with i ts supposed competing programs or philosophies within physics. In successive pe riods of history mechanism was contrasted to different competitors. Oppositions within physics included "mechanism" versus "materialism," "mechanism " versus "dynamism", and "mechanism" versus "the electromagnetic view of nature, " and "mechanism" versus "energeticism." Within nineteenth century biology the opposition was "mechanism" versus "vitalism," Most of these oppositions, especia lly when applied to research programs within physics, do associate "mechanism" w ith atomism, where atomism is interpreted in terms of massive, solid, atoms with shapes and locations in space. Contrasts of mechanism with vitalism in biolo gy or of mechanism with mentalism in philosophy of mind tend to tie mechanism le ss tightly with atomism. Examples in that mechanism does not necessarily involv e physical atomism include the Turing machine conception of mechanism, and Danie l Dennett's minimal conception of mechanism in discussing the philosophy of mind . Nevertheless, a recent treatment of the issue of mechanism in biology, The Cl ockwork Garden, does from the onset closely identify mechanism with atomism. In ancient Greek consideration of mechanism, based on the notion of "sim ple machines" (the lever, inclined plane, and screw), machines were considered t o be powered from the outside (as by human or animal power). "Mechanistic" was contrasted with "animistic," meaning powered from within, or self-powered. Thi s fits with ancient notions such as Plato's conception of the soul as the self-m oved, and Aristotle's conception of motion and animal souls. For Aristotle the motion of a projectile was "unnatural," forced from without, w hile animal motion was caused by the animal soul. Much later after inertia was

considered internal to bodies, the contrast of mechanistic with animated has bee n maintained, especially contrasting the mechanistic and the purposive. The ter m "mechanist" was opposed to "vitalist" in the early part of this century, to di stinguish mechanists who believed that life can be fully accounted for by mechan ical principles, and vitalists who believed a non-physical "vital force" operate d in living things. However, as quantum mechanics--with its indeterminism, nonlocalized particles, and "states" that, although deterministically evolving, are only indirectly tied to the actual positions, velocities, times, and energies o f particles--became the fundamental theory of molecules and hence of biological systems, "mechanism" so shifted its meaning as to destroy the determinism and so lid character of the fundamental objects of mechanism. Some have spoken of the "dematerialization of matter" in modern quantum mechanics, where many of the com mon-sensical attributes of matter are no longer attributed to matter. Because of the fact that the matter of contemporary sub-atomic physics h as lost the solidity, the simple location, and the purely particle character ass igned by atomic physicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some phi losophers have replaced the term "materialism" with "physicalism." Here what is real is whatever the best physical theory says it is, even if this is not "matt er" in the traditional sense of billiard ball-like atoms. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mechanism for the most pa rt meant Newtonian particle mechanics. To give a "mechanical" account of gravit y was to give a vortex theory of swirling particles of ether. To give a "mechan ical" account of electromagnetism was to give an account in terms of particles, or even in terms of gears and wheels, as Maxwell and Boltzmann attempted to do i n the late nineteenth century. Robert E. Schofield, in his Mechanism and Materialism, discusses two tra ditions stemming from the work of Newton during the century succeeding his work. Schofield characterized "mechanism" as follows: "The complete mechanist would a rgue that all phenomena of the physical universe (including physiological) were ultimately to be explained in terms of undifferentiable, homogeneous matter, exi sting in small, indivisible particles, solid, hard, and inert... These particles , possessing in virtue of their sizes and modes of arrangement, their own, lesse r forces of attraction and repulsion, also acted upon bodies at a distance and w ere also combined to form still larger, more porous and less forceful particles, ..., and so on, until the substances of the sensible world are achieved." Schofield contrasts this "mechanism" to "materialism" in which observabl e characteristics are explained, not by atomic constitution, but by characterist ics (really essential properties) of bodies. The characteristics for the materi alists are descriptive and observable. These characteristics were "the power to convey, in proportion to its quantity, some characteristic quality." This si mple dichotomy obviously does not apply precisely to all the British eighteenth century physicists. However, it does roughly correspond to the dichotomy of th ose mathematically-oriented physicists who took their inspiration from the atomi sm and mathematical equations of Newton's Principia, and those physicists and ch emists working in less mathematically tractable and qualitative areas than in me chanics, who took their inspiration from the concluding speculations of Newton's Optics. {move later or Dor cut? The "powers" of the more qualitative and empir ical British "materialists" could later be linked by mathematical followers of European "rational mechanics," with the "forces" of the "dynamical" conception o f matter. (This view contrasts with some of Schofield's own derivations, in see ing mechanism lead to dynamism in figures such as Davy.) } By the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, t he "mechanistic," atomistic view is contrasted to the "dynamical" view of nature . The dynamical conception was championed by followers of Leibniz and Kant suc h as the Romantics, and by physicists such as Maxwell. The dynamical approach emphasizes active forces. It does so either by 1.) hypothesizing that force is the ultimate nature of matter, or 2.)by being skeptical about all hypotheses ab out the nature of matter, and giving general formulations of mechanics compatib le with many physical models of matter. The latter sort of dynamist might admit

the possibility of an atomic model, but formulate hypotheses concerning forces or energy in a general way independent of the atomic model. These two apparentl y incompatible positions: an anti-atomist metaphysics of forces, and a skeptical phenomenology, distrustful of atomic hypotheses supported each other. Similarl y, a phenomenological physics, dealing with perceptual continua (and skeptical c oncerning unobserved and hypothetical atoms) sometimes supported mathematical co ntinuum mechanics theories that ended up giving metaphysical reality to the phys ical as opposed to phenomenological continuum itself. David Bohm remarks in Causality and Chance in Modern Physics that classi cal field theories differ from classical particle theories in that there are an infinite number of variables (indeed, an uncountable or non-denumerably infinite one): Thus the mechanistic program of predicting the future behavior of the universe was now clearly impossible in practice....If we consider a system enclosed in a box, it is true that the variables become countable (e.g., a Fouri er series). However, to treat the universe as a whole we are not permitted to assume such a box. Also, with respect to describing the states of electromagnetic or other field theories, unlike the theories of particle mechanics, there are a non-denum erable infinity of numbers relevant to the description of each state of the syst em. That is, each point in space occupied by the field has several numbers ass ociated with it, but there are a non-countable infinity of points in any finite region of space or space-time. That is, with a countably infinite set of variables, one can in principl e, count further, and, at least as a potential infinity, list all of them. But a non-countable infinity is such that even if you count forever, you will never count more than an infinitesimal fraction of the variables. One cannot list the m. The Laplacian ideal of enumerating the positions and momenta of all the part icles in the universe, and applying the laws of motion to them to predict every future state of the universe, was made impossible in quantum physics by the Heis enberg uncertainty principle, stating that both position and momentum cannot sim ultaneously be exactly determined. Less widely recognized is that this Laplacia n ideal is not possible even in classical field theory, because of the uncountab ly infinite number of variables involved, if one thinks of the enumeration as a sequential, step-by-step process. However, if the Laplacian mind is allowed to intuit a higher order infinity of number of positions and momenta, then Laplacia n determinism is not prevented simply by the number of quantities needed to be k nown. In the late nineteenth century, mechanism competed with the "electromagn etic worldview," that, building on fiield theory, claimed that themass of the pa rticle was wholly electromagnetic in nature. The strain center in the ether is the sole constituent of matter. The inertia of the electron is wholly a matter of the ether. Sir Joseph Larmor in Britain, Max Abraham in Germany, and, most fa mously, H. A. Lorentz in the Netherlands were notable among the major proponents of the electromagnetic view of matter. The electromagnetic worldview was shor t-lived. It was soon replaced by Einstein's special relativity theory, that, on the most common interpretations, eliminated the ether. Another short-lived competitor to mechanism in the late nineteenth centu ry was energeticism, supported by the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and the physicist Pierre Duhem. The motive of energeticism was more to replace materialism (disli ked for religious or philosophical reasons) with something non-materialistic, bu t it was also a somewhat popular competitor with mechanism. The descriptive, ma croscopic laws of thermodynamics were a model for "phenomenological" physics. E nergy was to be the ultimate stuff of the universe. Similarly to the electromag netic view, some energeticists, such as Duhem, wished to derive the laws of mech anics from those of electromagnetism, but not reduce mass to ether, and to deriv e electromagnetism from thermodynamic concepts. The special theory of relativi ty with the famous E=mc2 equivalence of mass and energy also did away with energ eticism, as it made energeticism's replacement of mass by energy with traditiona l materialism and mechanism's priority of matter a moot issue. In recent discussions of computers and artificial intelligence, "mechani

sm" has been given a different, quite general meaning, that is accountable for i n terms of a Turing machine. The Turing machine is an abstract generalization o f the notion of a deterministic, digital computer, developed by Alan Turing in t he 1930s (before physical digital computers were actually developed). A Turing machine, described concretely, has a tape, indefinitely long, and a head that ca n recognize a symbol, print or erase a symbol, and move the tape forward or back ward. Instructions are based solely on the symbol read on the tape and the inte rnal state of the machine. Turing, genius that he was, developed this concept n ot only to give a version of the foundation of mathematics and a general notion of mathematical computation, but to formalize the vague, informal notion of mech anism in order to discuss matters of determinism, the mind-body problem and the notion of artificial intelligence (decades before the field really developed). One off the counter-common-sensicalresults of this Turing machine notion of mech anism is that there are well-posed mathematical problems that are unsolvable or undecidable by any computer (a result related to Gdel's proof). Indeed, some of th e computations or behaviors generated by certain sets of instructions to Turing machines are unpredictable by us, in the sense that the shortest way to describe the behavior of the machine is a complete description of all the states that th e machine sequentially takes on. Thus a completely "mechanistic" and "determini stic" system can produce sequences of results that are "unpredictable." These results are obviously related to chaos theory, in which non-linear Newtonian deterministic systems produce results that are unpredictable. This la tter phenomenon involves sensitive dependence on initial conditions. That is, an infinitesimal perturbation of the starting point of the process, a perturbation in principle undetectable by empirical measurement, yields large finite differe nces in the end state. Such systems are in principle mathematically determinist ic, but also in principle physically unpredictable, at least in certain circumst ances. The relationship between uncomputability in Turing's and other equivalen t senses and unpredictability in quantum theory has also been investigated, thou gh less successfully. Daniel Dennett in his "Mechanism and Responsibility," is concerned with the mind-body problem and with issues related to Turing machines and artificial intelligence. Dennett presents a very broad conception of mechanism, that inclu des traditional mechanism, indeterministic quantum mechanics, and the Turing mac hine conception of mechanism. Dennett's very broad or weak conception of mechan ism is, I believe, related to determinism on the one hand, and to reductionism o n the other hand, by generalizations of different sorts. If the causal determin ation of mechanism is generalized "horizontally" to complete, precise, rigorous determination, one gets causal determinism. If the explanatory objects or state s of Dennett's minimal sense of "mechanism" are "deepened" or generalized "verti cally" to give "ultimate" objects of analysis whose states account for all event s of any sort, then one gets "reductionism" (A thoroughgoing reductionism is the idea that everything can be accounted for in terms of the states of one sort of object, say point-atoms or fundamental particles such as quarks.) But Dennett' s weak and loose notion of mechanism commits one neither to determinism nor redu ctionism. Certainly if one uses mechanism in Dennett's manner, not only Newtonian mechanics and classical mechanics but virtually any causal account is "mechanist ic." Indeed, Dennett, and the philosophers of mind whom he criticizes all use " mechanistic" to contrast with "intentional" or "purposive." (Interestingly, Denn ett does not further characterize mechanistic, although he discusses at length t he intentional and the purposive.) Sometimes the mechanistic account is identi fied with the causal account. Strictly speaking, "causal" here is limited to Ar istotle's "efficient causal" and excludes purposive accounts as not being causal . Since the 1600s mechanistic physicists and philosophers such as Descartes eli minated purposes from the purely physical, inorganic world and denied that final causality or purpose really was a kind of causality relevant to physical scienc e. Later, in our section on "Aristotle's Four Causes in Newtonian Mechanics" we shall criticize this tradition, that has dominated discussion in the last few c enturies.

On an account, such as that of Dennett and other philosophers of mind, t hat identifies the mechanical with the efficient causal, classical electromagnet ism is certainly mechanistic and is deterministic, at least in theory. However, in the late nineteenth century, partisans of the "dynamical" conception of natu re mentioned above, as well as defenders of the so-called "electromagnetic view of nature" opposed their views to the "mechanical view of nature." The claim o f Larmor that material particles might be excitations in the continuous ether, t hat the ether was not made of particles but was radically continuous, and that e ther strain rather than particles accounted for phenomena. (Truly particulate ether appears in the ether of Descartes, and of Newton leadin g to the circularity that the mysterious action at a distance of gravity is acco unted for by mechanical action of particles of the ether, but the interaction of these particles is ultimately explained by action at a distance). Interestingly, Steven Weinberg, one of the leading theoretical physicist s working on unification of the forces of nature (one of the inventors of the el ebates mechanism has been associated with atomism. In twentieth century theory of computation and logic, mechanism has been associated with exactly determined, digital processes, retaining the notions of discrete, atomistic units and rigor ous, deterministic laws. Theories of vital organisms and continuous fields has been opposed to mechanism, and both the latter have taken inspiration from holis tic doctrines. THE CONCEPT OF MECHANISM: ENDNOTES . Dijksterhuis, E. J., The Mechanization of the World Picture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 495. Christopher Hill, in his Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution ident ified the rude mechanics with the mechanical philosophy, but then relented, and in The World Turned Upside Down distinguished between mechanic atheism (anti-rel igious preaching by mechanics) and the mechanical philosophy, p. 295. . "If it is true that there are two kinds of people-- the logical positivists and the god-damned English professors--then I suppose I am a logical positivist, " Clark Glymour, Theory and Evidence, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Universit y Press, 1980, Preface. . Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, New England U. P., 1990,p . 221. See, for quotations illustrating anti-mechanistic rhetoric of German aca demics, for instance, pp. 246, 247, 262, 267, 357, 375, 377, 381, 386, 397. Ann e Harrington, Reenchanted Science, Princeton U P, 1996, p. 9, p.21 also emphasiz es the extent to which mechanism became associated with industrialization and ma ss society, in her much more detailed and tho La Mettrie, rough examination of e arly twentieth century German holistic biological and psychological theories. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man A Plant, transl. by Richar d A. Watson and May Ribalka, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. . I mention this to note that some conceptions of atoms as mathematical points , as centers of repulsive force with no substance, and as formal, Platonic entit ies, or as points in a multi-dimensional abstract phase space or state space (wh ich is not the three-dimensional space in which ordinary objects reside and in which we "live and move and have our being"), can lead one in an anti-mec hanistic direction. . Roger J. Farber, The Clockwork Garden: On the Mechanistic Reduction of Livin g Things, Amherst University of Massachusetts Press, 1986, p. 12. . E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 1961, p. 498. . Norwood Russell Hanson, "The Dematerialization of Matter," Philosophy of Sci ence, vol. 29, 1962, pp. 27-38, and "Dematerialization," in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter, Notre Dame, 1963, pp. 549-561. . John Dupr, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 91. . Martin J. Klein, "Boltzmann, Monocycles and Mechanical Explanation," in Raym ond J. Seeger and Robert S. Cohen, Philosophical Foundations of Science: Proceed

ings of the AAAS Program, 1969, meeting, Boston, 1969, Boston Studies in the Phi losophy of Science, vol. XI, Dortrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1974, pp. 155-175, b ut see Jed Z. Buchwald, From Maxwell to Micro-physics, Chicago: University of Ch icago Press, 1985, p. 20, for a differing view of the role of mechanical models in late Nineteenth century electrical theory. . Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism, Princeton: Princeton Univers ity Press, 1970, pp. 95-96. . Ibid. pp. 15-16. . Ibid. p. 292. . John Hendry, James Clerk Maxwell and the Theory of the Electromagnetic Field , Boston: Adam Hilger Ltd., 1986, Ch 2, passim. . A modern version of this, apparent non sequitur, from the continuity of phen omenal space to the continuity of the underlying physical reality (implicit in e ighteenth century continuum mechanics, as well as in Duhem's phenomenalism) is W ilfred Sellars' claim that the homogeneity of qualia combined with the mind-brai n identity theory demands a continuum basis for even the apparently particulate nature of matter. See "The Lever of Archimedes" in Sellars' Carus Lectures II, The Monist. vol. 64, no. 1 (January 1981) pp. 3-36. . David Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, London: Routledge and Ke gan Paul, 1957, reprinted New York: Harper and Row, 1961,and Philadelphia: Unive rsity of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, p. 41 & n. . Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, I nc., 1961, p. 287f. Barbara Giusti Doran, "Origins and Consolidation of the Field Theory in Ninet eenth Century Britain: From the Mechanical to the Electromagnetic View of Nature ," in Russell McCormach, ed., Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, vol. 6, Princeton U. P., 1975, pp. 256-257. On Lorentz see Russell McCormach, "H. A. Lorentz and the Electromagnetic View of Nature," Isis, vol. 61, 1970, pp. 459-497. Though Einstein delivered his lecture at Lorentz's Leiden, Holland, Ether and Re lativity , as late as 1920. See Albert Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity, New York: Dover Publications, 1983 (originally E. P. Dutton, 1922), pp. 1-24. A. N. Whit ehead also described the space-time continuum as an "ether of events." McCormach, "H. A Lorentz," op. cit., p. 461. An account (the only lengthy on e) in English which is sympathetic to Duhem's critique of Maxwell is O'Rahilly's two volume treatise Electromagnetics, Cork: 1938, but it is more concerned with anti-Einstein consequences than with energeticism as such. . For instance Marian B. Pour-El and Jonathan I. Richards, Computability in An alysis and Physics, Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1989, show computability of solutio ns of such equations as the classical wave equation and the heat equation, and t he computability of the individual eigenvalues but non-computabilty for the whol e sequence of eigenvalues, and the non-computability of some individual eigenvec tors, which results are relevant to quantum mechanics, p. 115-120, pp. 123-124. . Dennett, Daniel C., "Mechanism and Responsibility," Brainstorms, Bradford Books, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978, pp. 233-255. . Russell Mc Cormach, "H. A. Lorentz and the Electromagnetic View of Nature," I sis, vol. 51, 1970, pp. 459-497 and Doran, op. cit., pp. 133-260. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, Random House, Vintage, 1994, p. 17 3. Mistakenly Weinberg identifies mechanism with dialectical materialism, p. 17 1, which strongly rejected mechanism in its "naive" form of Cartesian and Newton ian particle physics, which Marxists call "mechanical materialism." Ibid., pp. 170, 172. . Noam Chomsky, lecture "Recent Work in Linguistics," University of New Hampshi re, April 12, 1995. ism." Ibid., pp. 17