Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics

Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics
Author: Hsiang-Ke Chao
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-07-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400724543

This volume addresses fundamental issues in the philosophy of science in the context of two most intriguing fields: biology and economics. Written by authorities and experts in the philosophy of biology and economics, Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics provides a structured study of the concepts of mechanism and causality in these disciplines and draws careful juxtapositions between philosophical apparatus and scientific practice. By exploring the issues that are most salient to the contemporary philosophies of biology and economics and by presenting comparative analyses, the book serves as a platform not only for gaining mutual understanding between scientists and philosophers of the life sciences and those of the social sciences, but also for sharing interdisciplinary research that combines both philosophical concepts in both fields. The book begins by defining the concepts of mechanism and causality in biology and economics, respectively. The second and third parts investigate philosophical perspectives of various causal and mechanistic issues in scientific practice in the two fields. These two sections include chapters on causal issues in the theory of evolution; experiments and scientific discovery; representation of causal relations and mechanism by models in economics. The concluding section presents interdisciplinary studies of various topics concerning extrapolation of life sciences and social sciences, including chapters on the philosophical investigation of conjoining biological and economic analyses with, respectively, demography, medicine and sociology.

In Search of Mechanisms

In Search of Mechanisms
Author: Carl F. Craver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2013-10-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022603982X

Neuroscientists investigate the mechanisms of spatial memory. Molecular biologists study the mechanisms of protein synthesis and the myriad mechanisms of gene regulation. Ecologists study nutrient cycling mechanisms and their devastating imbalances in estuaries such as the Chesapeake Bay. In fact, much of biology and its history involves biologists constructing, evaluating, and revising their understanding of mechanisms. With In Search of Mechanisms, Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden offer both a descriptive and an instructional account of how biologists discover mechanisms. Drawing on examples from across the life sciences and through the centuries, Craver and Darden compile an impressive toolbox of strategies that biologists have used and will use again to reveal the mechanisms that produce, underlie, or maintain the phenomena characteristic of living things. They discuss the questions that figure in the search for mechanisms, characterizing the experimental, observational, and conceptual considerations used to answer them, all the while providing examples from the history of biology to highlight the kinds of evidence and reasoning strategies employed to assess mechanisms. At a deeper level, Craver and Darden pose a systematic view of what biology is, of how biology makes progress, of how biological discoveries are and might be made, and of why knowledge of biological mechanisms is important for the future of the human species.

Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine

Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine
Author: Veli-Pekka Parkkinen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2018-07-13
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3319946102

This book is open access under a CC BY license. This book is the first to develop explicit methods for evaluating evidence of mechanisms in the field of medicine. It explains why it can be important to make this evidence explicit, and describes how to take such evidence into account in the evidence appraisal process. In addition, it develops procedures for seeking evidence of mechanisms, for evaluating evidence of mechanisms, and for combining this evaluation with evidence of association in order to yield an overall assessment of effectiveness. Evidence-based medicine seeks to achieve improved health outcomes by making evidence explicit and by developing explicit methods for evaluating it. To date, evidence-based medicine has largely focused on evidence of association produced by clinical studies. As such, it has tended to overlook evidence of pathophysiological mechanisms and evidence of the mechanisms of action of interventions. The book offers a useful guide for all those whose work involves evaluating evidence in the health sciences, including those who need to determine the effectiveness of health interventions and those who need to ascertain the effects of environmental exposures.

Discovering Cell Mechanisms

Discovering Cell Mechanisms
Author: William Bechtel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2006
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521812474

Bechtel emphasises how mechanisms were discovered by cell biologists and the instruments that made these inquiries possible.

The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy

The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy
Author: Stuart Glennan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2017-07-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 131755230X

Scientists studying the burning of stars, the evolution of species, DNA, the brain, the economy, and social change, all frequently describe their work as searching for mechanisms. Despite this fact, for much of the twentieth century philosophical discussions of the nature of mechanisms remained outside philosophy of science. The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into four Parts: Historical perspectives on mechanisms The nature of mechanisms Mechanisms and the philosophy of science Disciplinary perspectives on mechanisms. Within these Parts central topics and problems are examined, including the rise of mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century; what mechanisms are made of and how they are organized; mechanisms and laws and regularities; how mechanisms are discovered and explained; dynamical systems theory; and disciplinary perspectives from physics, chemistry, biology, biomedicine, ecology, neuroscience, and the social sciences. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of science, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as metaphysics, philosophy of psychology, and history of science.

What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter

What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter
Author: Justin Garson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-01-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108472591

This accessible book presents a new theory of biological functions and connects it to contemporary problems in philosophy and science.

Mechanisms and Consciousness

Mechanisms and Consciousness
Author: Marek Pokropski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000480739

This book develops a new approach to naturalizing phenomenology. The author proposes to integrate phenomenology with the mechanistic framework that offers new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. While mechanistic explanatory models are widely applied in cognitive science, their approach to describing subjective phenomena is limited. The author argues that phenomenology can fill this gap. He proposes two novel ways of integrating phenomenology and mechanism. First, he presents a new reading of phenomenological analyses as functional analyses. Such functional phenomenology delivers a functional sketch of a target system and provides constraints on the space of possible mechanisms. Second, he develops the neurophenomenological approach in the direction of dynamic modeling of experience. He shows that neurophenomenology can deliver dynamical constraints on mechanistic models and thus inform the search for an underlying mechanism. Mechanisms and Consciousness will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and the cognitive sciences.

Europe’s New Scientific Elite

Europe’s New Scientific Elite
Author: Barbara Hoenig
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2017-04-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315446022

Winner of the Harald Kaufmann Prize for Senior Researchers, 2018 This book examines the question of whether the process of European integration in research funding has led to new forms of oligarchization and elite formation in the European Research Area. Based on a study of the European Research Council (ERC), the author investigates profound structural change in the social organization of science, as the ERC intervenes in public science systems that, until now, have largely been organized at the national level. Against the background of an emerging new science policy, Europe’s New Scientific Elite explores the social mechanisms that generate, reproduce and modify existing dynamics of stratification and oligarchization in science, shedding light on the strong normative impact of the ERC’s funding on problem-choice in science, the cultural legitimacy and future vision of science, and the building of new research councils of national, European and global scope. A comparative, theory-driven investigation of European research funding, this book will appeal to social scientists with interests in the sociology of knowledge.

The New Mechanical Philosophy

The New Mechanical Philosophy
Author: Stuart Glennan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198779712

This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.

The Construction of Modern Science

The Construction of Modern Science
Author: Richard S. Westfall
Publisher:
Total Pages: 171
Release: 1971
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780521218634

The interplay between the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition and the mechanical philosophy during the 'scientific revolution'.