In the following, we will illustrate how we have used mechanistic philosophy of science in our case studies and what we have learned from them. Rather, multilevel mechanistic explanations can bring together more “bottom-up” perspectives from the cognitive sciences with more “top-down” perspectives from the social sciences in order to provide integrated explanations of complex social phenomena. The visual metaphors of looking at the phenomenon to be explained, looking down at the entities and activities that underlie the phenomenon, looking around at the ways in which these entities and activities are organized, and looking up at the environment in which the mechanism operates, are intended to emphasize that mechanistic explanations are not strongly reductive or “bottom-up” explanations. What is the environment in which the mechanism is situated, and how does it affect its functioning (‘looking up’)?.What are the organization and interactions of these entities and activities through which they contribute to the phenomenon (‘looking around’)?.What are the relevant entities and their activities (‘looking down’)?.What is the phenomenon to be explained (‘looking at’)?. In our article, we make use of the following four questions drawn from William Bechtel’s (2009) work to assess the adequacy and comprehensiveness of mechanistic explanations: We understand entities and activities liberally so as to accommodate the highly diverse sets of entities that are studied in the cognitive social sciences, from physically grounded mental representations to material artifacts and entire social systems. In our work, we have drawn on Stuart Glennan’s minimal account of mechanisms, according to which a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (Glennan 2017: 17). Our case studies deal with the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity. In our cases, we apply mechanistic philosophy of science to make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects of the cognitive social sciences. In this blog post, we will discuss three case studies of research programs at the interface of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. In our previous post, we discussed mechanistic philosophy of science and its contribution to the cognitive social sciences. Four questions about multilevel mechanisms
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