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Mental Mechanisms, Autonomous Systems, and Moral Agency

Mental Mechanisms, Autonomous Systems, and Moral Agency William Bechtel (bechtel@mechanism.ucsd.edu) Department of Philosophy, 0119, UCSD La Jolla, CA 92093-0119 USA Adele Abrahamsen (aabrahamsen@ucsd.edu) Center for Research in Language, 0526, UCSD La Jolla, CA 92093-0526 USA the 17 th and 18 th centuries often relied at least as much on speculation as on evidence, given limitations in the available techniques. By the 19 th century, though, biologists were obtaining data that allowed them to describe a variety of cellular phenomena (e.g., metabolism) and in some domains were making good progress towards mechanistic accounts (e.g., cell division). By the 20 th century the mechanistic project had been extended to the new field of psychology, with models offered for a variety of phenomena in perception (e.g., detecting colors), cognition (e.g., memory encoding and retrieval), and affect (e.g., motivation). .Despite robust pursuit of mechanistic models in biology and psychology, 20 th century philosophers of science focused instead on the laws of physics. Accordingly, they built a deductive-nomological framework in which explanation was construed as subsumption under laws. (Hempel, 1965). Recently, though, certain philosophers of science have called for renewed attention to mechanistic explanation. Focusing on such domains as cell biology, molecular biology, physiology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, they note that explanation most often takes the form of identifying component parts and operations within a system and showing how they are organized to realize the phenomenon of interest (Bechtel & Richardson, 1993; Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2005; Bechtel, 2006; Machamer, Darden, & Craver, 2000; Craver, in press). To build on this rediscovered insight, philosophers of science must first articulate the essentials of mechanistic explanation. Most crucially, a scientist seeking to offer a mechanistic explanation must identify the system responsible for the phenomenon of interest and decompose it into component parts and operations. Typically quite different techniques are needed to identify the parts within a mechanism than to identify their operations, and these inquiries may be carried out in relative isolation in different disciplines. Eventually specific operations must be localized within specific parts of the mechanism. This requires additional investigations, and perhaps even additional research techniques or disciplines. Mechanistic explanation offers a distinctive perspective on a number of issues in philosophy of science, notably, that of reduction. Mechanistic explanation is reductionistic insofar as it emphasizes the decomposition of systems into parts and operations. But it equally emphasizes that the parts and operations must be appropriately organized and the mechanism as a whole situated in an appropriate Abstract Mechanistic explanations of cognitive activities are ubiquitous in cognitive science. Humanist critics often object that mechanistic accounts of the mind are incapable of accounting for the moral agency exhibited by humans. We counter this objection by offering a sketch of how the mechanistic perspective can accommodate moral agency. We ground our argument in the requirement that biological systems be active in order to maintain themselves in non- equilibrium conditions. We discuss such consequences as a role for mental mechanisms in controlling active systems and agents’ development of a self concept in which the self is represented as a moral agent. Keywords: mechanistic explanation, mental mechanisms, autonomous systems, adaptive systems, self concept, agency. Introduction Explanation in cognitive science, as in other life sciences, primarily entails identifying and explicating the mechanisms responsible for phenomena of interest. Humanist critics deem such explanations incapable of explaining fundament- al features of human existence, especially the capacity for moral agency in which the agent makes choices about what actions to pursue. We argue that even if this objection is warranted against mechanisms as commonly conceived, mechanisms appropriate to biological phenomena have the resources required for explaining such agency. This class of mechanisms can best be understood in terms of autonomous systems and their components. Mechanistic Explanation The common conception of mechanism is rooted in mechanical devices of the 13 th -16 th centuries (e.g., clocks, Gutenberg’s printing press, and even mechanical animals). It found uptake in a strategy, relied upon extensively in the Scientific Revolution and still today, of explaining a phenomenon in nature by demonstrating how it could be produced from the activity of a mechanism. In the 17 th century, for example, Robert Boyle explained air pressure by construing air as composed of spring-like particles, and Descartes posited that the heart acted like a furnace, heating blood so as to circulate it. Moreover, Descartes championed a mechanical philosophy in which this explanatory strategy was to be applied to biological phenomena in general, including any psychological processes that were not unique to humans. The particular biological explanations offered in