Towards the Methodological Turn in the Philosophy of Science - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 12

results in causal analysis may not be independent of the modes of representation,
that is, equations or graphs, and clarifies the relationships between graphical and
equational representation of causality. Steel goes a step further to include DAGs as
a part of the definitions of philosophical notions of extrapolation and integration,
implying that theoretical propositions could be entranced by directly consisting of
representational tools.
Furthermore, the variations in methodologies could be represented by the change
in representational tools, and vice versa. Marcel Boumans's chapter revisits his
(Boumans 1999 ) “recipe-making” account of models. 3 It suggests that mathematics
provides the means of molding different ingredients into a new model. In a sense, as
Boumans points out, early econometricians such as Jan Tinbergen regarded mathe-
matical forms as determining the economic movement. However, when the focus
switched to identify causal structural relationship among variables, the primary
concern for econometricians was to seek the model's property of invariance. Since
the econometricians then adopted the strategy of relying on theories to do the job,
the role of mathematical molding was lost. These works show how thinking about
representation and models provides new insights into mechanisms and causal
structures.
6 Mediation and Extrapolation
Let us return to our original aspirations to bring together biological and economic
mechanisms and causality. The idea promoted in this volume is that studies in the
philosophy of science would be enriched by two ways of research. The first is to
start with the concepts that scientists use most in their practices. Such investigations
provide concrete grounds of scientific methods and activities on which philosophi-
cal notions can (and arguably should) be based. Readers can observe that most of
our chapters attempt to address simultaneously the notions of causality and
mechanisms. Though the notions defined and employed in their work—and the
cases they study—do not belong to one single account, the plural meanings of
mechanisms and causality clearly show their importance to understanding science.
The second way is to conduct interdisciplinary explorations on how the concepts
are understood by different groups of scientists and philosophers. In this volume,
in addition to Gr¨ne-Yanoff's chapter studying biological and economic game-
theoretic models, we have three chapters dealing with comparisons and contrasts of
facts and methods between economics and biomedical science. All three chapters
start with specific scientific works in economics and biomedical science, then
conduct methodological investigations on the case studied. One central common
theme, which has been dealt with by the authors of this volume under various
topics, such as Darden's interfield integration (Darden 2006 ) and Steel's
3 The term is coined by Mary Morgan ( 2008 ).