ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the themes of complexity and causality from Chapters 3 and 4. The first part of the chapter discusses what a complex mechanism is and shows how mechanistic thinking can be useful methodologically. However, whilst mechanisms are “real”, they are also overlapping, nested, contextual and dynamic, so except in the case of the very simplest of mechanisms, these can only ever be known under a description. So, it might be said that we “make up mechanisms” that what have are useful heuristic models that can adequately describe and explain our proposed mechanisms.
