Abstract:
The new mechanism trend in the twenty-first century philosophy of science, which deals with the special sciences in providing scientific explanations, depends centrally on the concept of mechanism, yet the lack of a rigorous definition of mechanism hampers both further conceptual progress and also interest or conceived utility by the scientific community. Perhaps worse than this, although much subsequent debate and detailed analysis are invested in the discourse of mechanism, things get blurred and diverge instead of heading toward a desired clarity and a minimal but reasonable consensus. In order to help us out of this situation, I offer a mathematical approach by exploiting the well-established mathematical abstraction of the Turing Machine. However, such a move inevitably brings to the table the broader philosophical question of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, that is, the successful deployment of mathematics -a deductive system which, as a grand tautology, merely repeats its axioms and is only trivially and analytically true- in representing the physical reality. To counter both challenges in a new breath, the concept of computation has been construed, in the light of recent interpretations, in a suitable way as to accommodate the elucidation of the concept of mechanism.
