THE RHETORIC OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MECHANISMS

摘要

Thinking in terms of mechanisms is a mode of intelligibility, a way we humans have of making the world understandable. To think about mechanisms, we need to find a systematic way to separate out their proper parts, so that their productive causal structures may be 'seen' and thereby understood. Mechanisms are comprised by entities and productive activities. To (ideally) characterize a mechanism it is important to enumerate the entities of which it is composed and describe the activities that show how the entities work and the complex ways in which they are inter-active. That is, to demonstrate (lay out) how the entities and activities produce the termination conditions in which we are interested. These activities are the causal processes by which the mechanisms function to produce some end. It is crucial, too, to grasp the historical contingency of what is acceptable as an adequate explanatory mechanism. What counts as an acceptable mechanism, or parts of mechanisms, has developed over time. As science 'progresses', new entities and new activities are discovered, individuated and established, and what is taken to be fundamental to a mechanism changes to include the new discoveries, new theories, new practices of science, and, of course, new forms of discourse and what is taken as persuasive.