What Is The Meaning of Deterministic Mechanics…???

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(pages 95-96)
Historically, as Hull notes, mechanistic explanations were opposed to
teleology. We shall use ‘mechanical’ and its cognates in that historical
sense. Whatever we make ‘mechanical’ to mean and whatever we make
‘final’ to mean, we will keep them opposed. Opposed, that is, not in the
sense that explanations of both types cannot be legitimate, but in the
sense that they can never be the same or reduced one to the other. But
that decision does not determine the precise meaning of ‘mechanical’,
since the conceptions of teleological explanation and of final causation
are yet to be determined. Our question is whether naturalistic explanation
must always be exclusively mechanistic. To frame that question in a
nontrivial way, we need definitions of ‘mechanical’ and of ‘final’ that are
rooted in historical usage but that are also the broadest possible while
still maintaining their mutual opposition.

The science of mechanics is too narrow to provide such a definition.
Not all theories in modern science that have been opposed to teleology
belong to mechanics. Hence, we shall have to form a more general idea
of the mechanistic, of which mechanics will be but one example. But let
us begin by reflecting on mechanics.

The conception of mechanics has undergone a remarkable evolution.
At first, mechanics was the study of the transmission of motion through
bodily contact, as with cogwheels and billiard balls. But gravity, whose law
Newton formulated but did not explain by any mechanism, seemed to
be a kind of ‘action at a distance’, that is, force acting instantaneously
over distance without bodily contact. And with quantum mechanics, in
which there are even stranger relations between distant particles, the
assumption of determinism was replaced by probability. The standard
definition of mechanics, as the science of the effects, either movement
or equilibrium, of forces on bodies, abstracts from these variants (if we
allow that ‘effects’ may be related only probabilistically to their ‘causes’).
But what is a body?

In the development of the wave theory of light and field theories of
electromagnetism (in which, at any rate, there is no action at a distance,
as they allot time to the propagation of energy through space), a continuous
material medium was once supposed. At another time, wave and
field phenomena were interpreted by a hypothetical interaction of discrete
particles. Here we have two ideas of the body involved, one continuous
and singular, the other discontinuous and plural. At a later stage
in the development of these theories, no material medium at all was
supposed; wave and field theories thus became independent of mechanics.
In contemporary physics, with Schr¨odinger’s wave mechanics, matter
itself is seen to have wave characteristics. So, what is matter? The particles
of microphysics do not behave in ways it was once thought proper for
bodies to behave. Thus it is far from clear what philosophers today, who
believe that matter and mechanical action is everything, really do believe.

The generalized idea of mechanics mentioned above is subject to
a further generalization, by dropping its reference to bodies and thus
extending its reach to wave and field theories. The result cannot be called
‘mechanics’, but we will adopt it as a definition of ‘mechanistic’. Mechanics
is then but one mechanistic science among others.

Let us say that an explanation of a particular,E(for effect), is mechanistic
if and only if, by general laws or equations, deterministic or probabilistic,
it relates E to particulars (forces, bodies, events, states, conditions, fields,
or processes) that exist or occur or obtain not later than E. The laws
cited will also be called ‘mechanistic’: mechanistic laws relate particulars
to particulars – that is, they relate particulars of one type to particulars
of other types. And something is mechanical, we shall say, if, and only so
far as, it conforms to mechanistic laws: that is, if, and only so far as, facts
about it are explicable mechanistically. A mechanical cause is a particular
that is not later than its effect, to which it is related by a mechanistic law.

There are of course mechanistic explanations of laws or general phenomena
as well as of particulars, and these are usually the explanations
that are of most interest in science. Roughly, such explanations show
the law or general phenomenon to be explained to be an instance of
other laws, perhaps as applied to conditions of certain kinds. But these
latter laws must also be mechanistic, that is, they relate particulars of
one type to particulars of other types. That is fundamental to our ensuing
argument, namely, that mechanistic explanation is always in terms of
laws that relate particulars (of one type) to particulars (of other types).
In practice, the requirement of law may be greatly relaxed: a rough
idea that this is a regular way that things go on may do, and that idea does
not have to be stated. ‘The window was broken by being hit by a stone’ is a
mechanistic explanation. Also, we said nothing about whether laws must
be universal or may be local, nor how causes are to be identified (e.g., as
complete, partial, necessary, sufficient, independently controlled, salient
practically). Our definitions take for granted that there are concepts
of explanation, law, and cause; but they presuppose no specific such
concepts. Thus we evade complex controversies. We have only stipulated
what, in each of those categories, however they may be construed, we
shall call ‘mechanistic’ or ‘mechanical’.

There are philosophers who insist that a mechanistic explanation must
cite particular mechanisms that ‘bring about’ the effects explained. We
omit such a clause, since many scientists and philosophers have thought
that subsumption under law suffices to explain phenomena nonteleologically.
But the broth may be peppered with such clauses, according
to your taste. Our definitions are deliberately broad, meaning only to
exclude the teleological.

Final causation is excluded by our having made mechanistic explanation
of particulars always to be by particulars. For a final cause is never
a particular. Particulars are identified spatio-temporally.2 Final causes –
whether ends or ideals – have no spatio-temporal identity or particular
existence.

By this definition of ‘mechanistic’, psychological, sociological, and economic
explanations are also mechanistic to the extent that they explain
particular outcomes as following by law, often probabilistic, from particular
conditions. If that seems too much a stretch of the mechanistic idea,
we may call these explanations ‘nomological’, noting that they also are
opposed to teleological explanation.

It has been common among philosophers at least since Hume to suppose
that mechanical causes are particular events that precede and determine
their particular effects, which are also events.We have brought that
idea into closer conformity with physical theory, wherein events are not
always at issue, the processes described are often continuous, many equations
relate co¨existing conditions, and laws may be probabilistic.3

2. Spatio-temporal location may be complex. Two fields of force extend throughout space and in that sense coincide. Yet they are distinguishable spatio-temporally by the fact that they are identified with different magnitudes and directions at the same spatio-temporal points (in the simplest cases, they have distinct centers). The magnitude and direction of a force is of course revealed through actual effects on existing bodies.
3. Many authors instead deny that causality has much to do with modern physics. It comes to the same. My choice is dictated by the convenience of causal language for our purpose.

Notice that I have used the adjective ‘mechanical’ to characterize phenomena,
their causes, and so on, and the adjective ‘mechanistic’ to characterize
theories and explanations. (By calling laws ‘mechanistic’, we take
them as stated; that is not to deny their reality.) For our purposes, it
helps to keep these two levels terminologically distinct. For example, to
call a mechanistic explanation ‘mechanical’ is confusing, as that could
mean that it was produced thoughtlessly. Philosophy presents a third
level. The philosophical idea that all of the world operates mechanically
and that everything can be explained mechanistically is conventionally
named ‘mechanism’, but as that term also applies to particular mechanical
systems, I suggest that we use ‘mechanicalism’ instead.4 One can
accept many mechanistic explanations and theories – one can be a physicist
working exclusively in mechanics – without being a mechanicalist. I
like my neologism ‘mechanicalism’ because it is as awkward as is, in my
opinion, the view it denotes.