Jason Winning

Some recent discussions of mechanistic explanation have focused on control operations. But control is often associated with teleological or normative sounding concepts like goals and setpoints, prompting the question: Does an explanation that refers to parts or entities within mechanisms “controlling” each other thereby fail to be mechanistic? In this article, I introduce a distinction between open-ended and closed-ended control. I then argue that explanations that enlist control operations to do explanatory work can count as mechanistic in the New Mechanist sense only if such control operations are closed-ended, not open-ended. In certain scientific fields that incorporate control operations within their mechanistic models, for example, systems neuroscience, the state of the science is such that this requirement often cannot be met. We should therefore distinguish between models/explanations that are “mechanistic” in the strict (New Mechanist) sense and those that are “mechanistic” in a weaker sense employed by fields in the latter category.

Emergence is much discussed by both philosophers and scientists. But, as noted by Mitchell (2012), there is a significant gulf; philosophers and scientists talk past each other. We contend that this is because philosophers and scientists typically mean different things by emergence, leading us to distinguish being emergence and pattern emergence. While related to distinctions offered by others between, for example, strong/weak emergence or epistemic/ontological emergence (Clayton, 2004, pp. 9–11), we argue that the being vs. pattern distinction better captures what the two groups are addressing. In identifying pattern emergence as the central concern of scientists, however, we do not mean that pattern emergence is of no interest to philosophers. Rather, we argue that philosophers should attend to, and even contribute to, discussions of pattern emergence. But it is important that this discussion be distinguished, not conflated, with discussions of being emergence. In the following section we explicate the notion of being emergence and show how it has been the focus of many philosophical discussions, historical and contemporary. In section 3 we turn to pattern emergence, briefly presenting a few of the ways it figures in the discussions of scientists (and philosophers of science who contribute to these discussions in science). Finally, in sections 4 and 5, we consider the relevance of pattern emergence to several central topics in philosophy of biology: the emergence of complexity, of control, and of goal-directedness in biological systems.