Does Craver & Kaplan's model-to-mechanism-mapping (3M) / how-possibly-vs-how-actually literature already name the 'surface match without mechanism identity' structure, read directly rather than through Grujicic's secondhand use of it?
Scope: this capture answers
question-does-craver-kaplan-3m-how-possibly-how-actually-vocabulary-name-surface-match-without-mechanism-identity
directly — by fetching and reading the mechanistic-explanation literature itself (Machamer,
Darden & Craver 2000; Kaplan & Craver 2011's model-to-mechanism-mapping constraint, read via a
peer-reviewed paper that quotes it with pinpoint page citations) rather than only through
Grujicic's 2024 secondhand use of the
same apparatus. Kaplan & Craver's own 2011 Philosophy of Science paper and their 2020 BJPS
paper sit behind publisher paywalls this vault's tooling could not reach (academic.oup.com and
University of Chicago Press/JSTOR routes both known-blocked per 00-meta/specs/sources.md); no
open-access copy of either was found hosted by the authors or on philsci-archive. The closest
reachable primary material was Machamer, Darden & Craver's foundational 2000 paper (co-authored
by Craver, freely hosted) and Lauren Ross's 2015 critique, which quotes Kaplan & Craver's 2011
3M constraint and its surrounding argument verbatim with page numbers.
Claim: Machamer, Darden & Craver (2000) frame "how-possibly" mechanism descriptions as intelligible-but-wrong — a model that renders a phenomenon's production understandable without being the mechanism that actually produces it
verifies: question-does-craver-kaplan-3m-how-possibly-how-actually-vocabulary-name-surface-match-without-mechanism-identity
Claim type: technical-mechanism / definitional. Floor: Tier 1-2 required — met (direct full read of the primary, verbatim quote, verified TLS, quote-checked against the extracted text).
Machamer, Darden, and Craver's 2000 paper — the paper that coined "mechanism schema" and "mechanism sketch," and that Craver's later how-actually/how-possibly usage (cited by Grujicic 2024 via Craver 2007) builds on — states the distinction explicitly and with worked examples: "Mechanism descriptions show how possibly, how plausibly, or how actually things work. Intelligibility arises not from an explanation's correctness, but rather from an elucidative relation between the explanans... and the explanandum... Protein synthesis can be elucidated by reference to Gamow holes. The ability of nerves to conduct signals can be rendered intelligible by reference to their internal vibrations. Neither of these explanations is correct; yet each provides intelligibility by showing how the phenomena might possibly be produced." Both named examples — Gamow's proposal that DNA "holes" directly shaped proteins, and a vibration-based account of nerve conduction — are candidate mechanisms that are intelligible (they would, if true, account for the phenomenon) without being the mechanism that actually operates. Read directly, this is the mechanistic-explanation literature's own general statement of a model/account that fits — renders intelligible, could-produce — an explanandum without identity to the actual underlying mechanism. It is framed as a property of a single candidate mechanism judged against its one target phenomenon, not as a comparison between two different systems.
Claim: Kaplan & Craver's (2011) model-to-mechanism-mapping (3M) constraint explicitly distinguishes models that fit a phenomenon's behavior from models whose variables map onto the mechanism's actual components, and treats the first without the second as non-explanatory
verifies: question-does-craver-kaplan-3m-how-possibly-how-actually-vocabulary-name-surface-match-without-mechanism-identity
Claim type: technical-mechanism. Floor: Tier 1-2 required. Kaplan & Craver (2011)'s own
venue (Philosophy of Science 78(4), 601-627) was unreachable to this session's tooling; the
quotes below are Kaplan & Craver's words as directly quoted, with pinpoint page citations, inside
Lauren Ross's peer-reviewed 2015 Philosophy of Science critique — a Tier 1 document in its own
right, read in full via extract_pdf from the author's own hosted copy, not a summarizing layer.
This is recorded as a secondary rendering of the primary's exact wording, not a substitute for
reading Kaplan & Craver (2011) directly; a future session with a working route past the
University of Chicago Press paywall should confirm against the primary itself.
Ross's exposition states the general distinction plainly: "If a model merely describes or predicts the explanandum, without citing the causal factors that produce it, the model is regarded as non-explanatory" — a distinction she notes (fn. 2) Kaplan & Craver build on Woodward's domain-general interventionist account of causal explanation, not a neuroscience-specific stipulation. Applied to dynamical models whose variables represent macroscopic, behavioral features of a neural system rather than its underlying parts, she quotes Kaplan & Craver's own verdict: such variables "are not components in the sense of being the underlying parts of the mechanism" and "merely provide mathematically compact characterizations of system-level behavior" (2011, 614-15) — i.e., they can fit, redescribe, or predict the system's behavior (surface match) while failing 3M's requirement that model variables and their dependencies map onto the mechanism's actual components and causal organization (mechanism identity). Kaplan & Craver go further and name the error of treating such fit as explanatory: those who do so "fundamentally misidentify the source of explanatory power in their models" (602). Read directly rather than through Grujicic, this is the 3M literature's own general naming of "surface match without mechanism identity" — stated as a criterion for when a model of one target mechanism counts as explanatory, independent of Grujicic's 2024 application of the same criterion to DCNN-vs-brain comparisons.
Claim: both located sources frame the structure as a model-vs-its-one-target-mechanism relation, not as a comparison between two different systems — so, like Gentner's "mere appearance match," this is a near-miss that names the general shape but not the vault's cross-system scope
verifies: question-does-craver-kaplan-3m-how-possibly-how-actually-vocabulary-name-surface-match-without-mechanism-identity
Claim type: definitional / meta (characterizing what the two claims above do and don't establish). Floor: Tier 3-4 acceptable for this kind of claim; in practice it rests on the same Tier 1 sources already quoted above.
Both the how-possibly/how-actually distinction (Machamer, Darden & Craver 2000) and the 3M constraint (Kaplan & Craver 2011, via Ross 2015) are stated as a relation between one model or candidate mechanism and the one target mechanism it purports to explain — not as a comparison between two independently-specified systems the way Gentner's structure-mapping theory compares a base domain against a target domain, or the way the vault's RSA case compares a DCNN against a brain, or the Minsky-1961 case compares a later-coined label against an earlier text. This matches the open question's own anticipated failure mode — "like Hacking's 'styles of scientific reasoning' before it, it turns out to import an assumption... that keeps it from spanning the vault's broader proposed unification" (claim-hackings-styles-of-scientific-reasoning-does-not-name-vaults-bridge-category, same genre of result). The answer to the core question is therefore mixed rather than a clean yes or no: read directly, the 3M/how-possibly literature does already name the general shape — intelligible-but-wrong, or behaviorally-fitting-but-not-mechanistically-identical — and does so independently of, and prior to, Grujicic's 2024 use of it; but it does not supply the vault's specific cross-system comparison framing any more cleanly than Gentner's 1983 "mere appearance match" already does. It is a second, independent near-miss on the same open question, not a resolution of it.
Further leads
- Lindsay Brainard's "How to Explain How-Possibly" (Philosophers' Imprint 20(13), 2020, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, hosted at quod.lib.umich.edu) explicitly argues that "a fully satisfactory general account of how-possibly explanation" did not yet exist as of 2020 and proposes one spanning "an everyday case and a case from ornithology" — i.e., a deliberately domain-general treatment, not neuroscience-specific. Only the abstract/description was reached this session (the quod.lib.umich.edu PDF route returned HTTP 403, and no mirror was found); worth a direct fetch attempt in a future session, since a general how-possibly account spanning everyday and biological cases is the most promising remaining lead for the vault's cross-system framing. [unverified-mechanism — needs primary]
- Kaplan & Craver (2020), "Are More Details Better? On the Norms of Completeness for Mechanistic
Explanations" (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71(1), 287-319) — the paper
Grujicic also cites — was not reached; academic.oup.com's BJPS article pages were not tried
directly this session but are presumptively behind the same paywall pattern as other Oxford
University Press journal platforms already known-blocked in
00-meta/specs/sources.md. - David Kaplan's solo 2011 Synthese paper, "Explanation and Description in Computational
Neuroscience" (183(3), 339-373), develops the 3M criterion specifically for computational
neuroscience; a ResearchGate-hosted PDF exists but returned HTTP 403 to
extract_pdfthis session. - Mazviita Chirimuuta's responses to Kaplan (2013, 2018) on explanation in computational neuroscience were noted in passing in Ross's bibliography but not chased this session.
Entity candidates
- Peter Machamer — person — co-author (with Darden and Craver) of the 2000 paper that coined "mechanism schema," "mechanism sketch," and the how-possibly/how-actually language the rest of this literature (including Grujicic 2024) builds on; the senior, foundational figure this whole apparatus is measured against, and the one the vault's existing notes had not yet flagged.
- Lindley Darden — person — co-author of the same 2000 paper; developed the mechanism-schema framework further with Craver in In Search of Mechanisms (2013).
- Carl Craver — person — co-author of Machamer, Darden & Craver (2000) and of Kaplan & Craver (2011, 2020); already present in the vault only via Grujicic's secondhand citation of him, not as his own entity.
- David M. Kaplan — person — co-author of the 3M constraint (2011, with Craver) and sole author of the 2011 Synthese computational-neuroscience paper developing 3M further.
- Lauren N. Ross — person — author of the 2015 Philosophy of Science critique that is this capture's actual read of Kaplan & Craver's 3M wording; argues dynamical models can explain without meeting 3M, via Batterman's minimal-model account.
- model-to-mechanism-mapping (3M) — concept — Kaplan & Craver's named constraint; already present in the vault via claim-grujicic-frames-dcnn-critique-on-3m-not-marr-levels but not yet as its own concept entity independent of Grujicic's use of it.
- how-possibly / how-actually explanation — concept — the Machamer-Darden-Craver / Craver (2007) / Brainard (2020) distinction between an intelligible candidate mechanism and the mechanism that actually operates; candidate for its own entity page given it recurs across at least three sources found this session.