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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Partial reductions share important features with mechanistic explanations

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Mechanistic explanations require the identification of activities and entities organized to produce a phenomenon, not merely causal postulation.
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    • 2.Partial reductions can appeal to statistical regularities or functional relations without specifying any underlying mechanism.
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    • 3.Sharing some surface features does not establish the structural identity of explanatory schema that the claim implies.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Nagel-style reductions operate via bridge laws connecting predicates across theories, while mechanistic explanations proceed by decomposition of organized systems.
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    • 2.Kitcher's unificationist account shows that reductive explanations gain their epistemic force by subsuming phenomena under general argument patterns, not by identifying causal parts.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Partial reductions are local
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    • 2.Partial reductions postulate a causal mechanism responsible for the target phenomenon
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    • 3.Partial reductions refer to constituents in the explanation
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