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Jan 1, 2011 · Abstract. After a decade of intense debate about mechanisms, there is still no consensus characterization. In this paper we argue for a characterization that applies widely to mechanisms across ...
Jul 14, 2018 · The chapter emphasises that EBM+ is concerned with evidence of mechanisms, not mere just-so stories, and summarises some key roles assessing evidence of mechanisms can play, particularly with respect to assessing efficacy and external validity. This chapter introduces mechanisms and their use in the context of working with evidence in medicine.
- 10.1007/978-3-319-94610-8_2
- 2018/07/14
- William Bechtel
- 3 Delineating Phenomena
- 5 Recomposing and Situating the Mechanism
- 6 Conclusion
Department of Philosophy and Center for Chronobiology, University of California, San Diego, email: bill@mechanism.ucsd.edu Abstract In many fields of biology, researchers explain a phenomenon by charac-terizing the responsible mechanism. This requires identifying the candidate mech-anism, decomposing it into its parts and operations, recomposing it...
Mechanisms are invoked to explain phenomena and so it is important to specify what phenomena are. While many accounts of explanation have assumed that sci-entists try to explain observations (data), Bogen and Woodward (1988) convinc-ingly demonstrate that what they in fact seek to explain are phenomena in the world. Although some phenomena only occ...
Acquiring the catalog of parts and operations is an important step in developing mechanistic explanations, but until investigators determine how the operations of parts affect other parts (those they operate on) in a coordinated fashion to produce the phenomenon, they have not yet explained the phenomenon. A researcher is no more satisfied with the...
When biologists seek to explain a phenomenon, in many contexts what they are looking for is an account of the mechanism responsible for it. I have described some of the distinctive features of mechanistic research, including its frequent re-liance on diagrammatic representations and the strategies for discovering mecha-nisms. A critical first step ...
- 957KB
- 27
Sep 13, 2011 · After a decade of intense debate about mechanisms, there is still no consensus characterization. In this paper we argue for a characterization that applies widely to mechanisms across the sciences. We examine and defend our disagreements with the major current contenders for characterizations of mechanisms. Ultimately, we indicate that the major contenders can all sign up to our characterization.
- Phyllis McKay Illari, Jon Williamson
- 2012
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. The concept of mechanism in biology has three distinct meanings. It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology (‘mechanicism’), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure (‘machine mechanism’), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon (‘causal mechanism’).
- Phyllis Illari, Jon Williamson
the mechanism of protein synthesis where mRNA is made when needed and broken down afterwards. Further, many mechanisms are complex, but they can also be simple.1 The mechanism of thermal dissociation of the diatomic iodine molecule in the vapour phase seems too simple to be called either a system or a structure. The stretching vibration just
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Dec 11, 2021 · In this paper we identify six theses that constitute core results of philosophical investigation into the nature of mechanisms, and of the role that the search for and identification of mechanisms play in the sciences. These theses represent the fruits of the body of research that is now often called New Mechanism. We concisely present the main arguments for these theses. In the literature ...
