William Bechtel (Philosophy) bill@mechanism.ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego Department of Philosophy, 0119 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0119 Phone: (858) 822-4461 Fax: (858) 534-8566 Home Page Profile William Bechtel explores issues in the philosophy of the life sciences, including cell biology, biochemistry, neuroscience, and cognitive science. He is particularly excited about the project of constructing a mechanistic philosophy of science, which takes the view that phenomena are often explained by specifying mechanisms. This is in accord with how life scientists actually work, but contrasts with the assumption in traditional philosophy of science that explanation involves deduction from laws. On Bechtel’s analysis, a mechanistic model specifies a decomposition of a phenomenon in terms of component operations localized in component parts of a mechanism. The coordinated activity of a mechanism often reflects complex, non-linear organization of its components. Bechtel is currently developing a taxonomy of types of organization and their consequences. Mechanistic explanations are reductive insofar as they decompose a system into component parts and operations to explain its behavior. But since the phenomenon of interest arises only when the mechanism is appropriately organized and is operating under appropriate environmental conditions, mechanistic explanation but also take these higher-level factors into account. This has led Bechtel to claim that mechanistic explanation provides for both reduction and the autonomy of higher-level inquiries. A second focus of Bechtel’s research is how scientists discover and reason about mechanisms. For example, scientists often rely on figures and diagrams. Bechtel is currently exploring the nature of such reasoning and how it differs from the sorts of reasoning with linguistic representations for which canons of logic have been articulated. He has also examined problems raised by scientists’ reliance on research instruments and techniques for identifying component parts, their operations, and their organization. New instruments and techniques are prone to produce artifacts, and a challenge for scientists is to distinguish artifacts from genuine findings. Since it is often not well understood how instruments and techniques themselves work at the time they are invoked in science, the criteria scientists employ to evaluate them are necessarily indirect. Bechtel has argued that one criterion is whether the results fit plausible mechanistic models of the phenomenon. Third, scientific investigation typically occurs within the context of institutions and communities. Professional societies and journals do not just happen—they require constructive effort by scientists. They often are the result of deliberation by scientists about the kind of research they endorse and what types of colleagues they want to associate with. These institutions, however, also help define the opportunities for career development by scientists. Bechtel has examined how research at the intersection of established disciplines gives rise to new institutions. Bechtel’s approach to these issues in philosophy of science is naturalistic. He appeals to the actual practice of science, particularly as observed in its history, to answer such questions as what counts as a mechanistic explanation, how new techniques are developed to investigate them, and the role institutions play in shaping investigations. He is currently exploring these issues by focusing on a particular case—the creation of modern cell biology in the mid-twentieth century. New techniques such as cell fractionation and electron microscopy enabled the decomposition of the cytoplasm of cells into component organelles and their operations. He has also been engaged in an examination of the development of cognitive neuroscience in the last 15 years of the 20th century. New imaging techniques (PET, fMRI) as well as new modeling techniques (neural networks) made it possible to develop neurally-grounded mechanistic models of cognition. Bechtel is author of Philosophy of Science (Erlbaum, 1988), Philosophy of Mind (Erlbaum, 1988), Connectionism and the Mind (with A. Abrahamsen: Blackwell 1991, 2002), Discovering Complexity (with R.C. Richardson: Princeton, 1993), and editor of Integrating Scientific Disciplines (Nijhoff, 1986), A Companion to Cognitive Science (Blackwell, 1998), and Philosophy and the Neurosciences (Blackwell, 2001). He is editor of the journal Philosophical Psychology.