Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mechanistic explanations reveal the rich causal structure of the world we inhabit. For instance, an explanation like “A clock ticks because an internal motor turns a gear which moves the hands” explains a feature of the clock (i.e., the fact that it ticks) by describing the parts and actions that cause it. People often seek out such explanations, as they may be particularly valuable to understanding the world. However, are mechanistic explanations truly a single class of explanation? Here, we distinguish between two subtypes of mechanism: constitutive and etiological. We argue that this distinction, long made by philosophers of science, has cognitive consequences: People treat these two kinds of explanation differently and prefer one kind over the other. We discuss implications for understanding mechanism and for explanation preferences more broadly.