Decomposing an interaction: Part 2

It seems to me that the ‘goal’ of the discussion that was happening on Thursday morning (see part 1 for clarification) was to explain how energy transfers and transformations take place – we see that they happen…but why do they happen, what causes them to happen. Ultimately to come up with a force story to complement the energy story.

There were a few moments in Stamatis’ extended interaction with group 1 (Derrick, Bruce, Don, Tim, and Jim) in which they seemed to try to answer this question, but not (apparently) mechanistically. They gave a reason for why energy might be transferred or transformed, but it was not connected to something that was doing the transferring or transforming. For example, after some dialogue about forces, Derrick piped up and said, “Are you looking for something more fundamental?,” and then proceeded to talk about lower-energy states being more probable as the why for energy transfer or transformation. Take a look:

In the end, I’m not totally sure whether Derrick proposed this because he thought Stamatis was ‘rejecting’ forces as a mechanistic explanation, or because he was thinking that this ‘lower-energy states’ was the story he saw as relevant to the question.

I read a paper about mechanistic reasoning when I was working on my dissertation by Rosemary Russ, Rachel, David Hammer, and Jamie Mikeska (link to paper here). Rachel, correct me if I butcher this, but my understanding was that there is a difference between a cause and a mechanism. Although Derrick’s in-the-moment ‘theory’ is causal (in that it would explain a change in energy), it is not mechanistic because it does not speak to the “process underlying the association” between the cause and the effect.

So…it seems that at least one of the sticky points at certain moments in this interaction was a mismatch between (at least) Derrick’s perception of what a mechanism is…and what was meant by the question.