Evaluating Competing Mechanisms Sample Clauses

Evaluating Competing Mechanisms. The search for mechanisms involves committing to what Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx call a ‘garden- variety’ realism that assumes that full-fledged target mechanisms such as DNA repair mechanisms or cellular transport mechanisms really exist (201 3, 9, 68).5 Subscribing to this kind of moderate realism in turn requires ways to evaluate and test competing mechanism schemas. One obvious way to do this involves experimentation. As Bechtel and Xxxxxxxxxx observe, “a researcher tests hypothesized mechanisms by inferring how the mechanism or its components will behave under specified conditions and uses the results of actually subjecting the system to these conditions to evaluate the proposed mechanism” (2005, 436). This would mean, for instance, that in the example of a broken doll, a child forms a hypothesis about how the limb fits into the socket, and tries to reattach it accordingly. Her hypothesis is then corroborated or disconfirmed based on whether the limb can be put back into the socket or not.6 Along similar lines, more complex experiments are carried out at all levels of investigating inorganic and organic mechanisms, including chemical reactions, transport mechanisms, regulations mechanisms, reproduction mechanisms, and so forth. Physical experiments are not the only means available for evaluating mechanisms, however – nor, arguably, should they be the first line of defense. Mechanisms can and ought to be assessed theoretically, before the costs of experimentation are taken on. Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx delineate three criteria for evaluating mechanisms, concentrating on the ways in which mechanisms can succeed, fall short or fail altogether. The first class of mechanism schema failure is ‘superficiality’ (Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx, 2013, 87-89; see also Xxxxxx 2006). Superficial schemas re-describe a phenomenon without providing an account of an underlying or internal mechanism that would generate it. They 5 Or at least ‘exists’ in some sense. Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx note, “one can acknowledge the ideals… for descriptions of mechanisms while, at the same time, recognizing that science traffics in idealized and incomplete schemas” (2013, 9).