[Revised entry by Carl Craver, James Tabery, and Phyllis Illari on August 1, 2024.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
The concept of mechanism has been an important organizing principle in science and philosophy since at least the early modern period (Dijksterhuis 1950 [1961]; Boas 1952). The nature of that organizing principle, and precisely how it scaffolds the organization of material knowledge, has changed considerably over time. In late twentieth century philosophy of science, the term “mechanism” came to stand for a kind of theoretical structure according to which some capacity or behavior of a whole or an endstate of a process is…

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