Explaining the Explanations of 100 Million Missing Women - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 232

situations that may correspond to the causal structure of the sea of disturbances;
then, based on this partial causal image, we thus append a complementary causal
story to our original biological explanation, as in our case of the missing women, to
make the explanation more complete and plausible. 6
This patch-up methodology is not conducted for the purpose of preserving
a falsified hypothesis; instead, the methodology is supplemented with the process
of theory-building in an attempt to obtain—as illustrated in our case—a more
complete understanding of the targeted phenomenon, be it a normal or an
anomalous one.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank all conference participants for their comments and
suggestions on an early version of this chapter. Special thanks go to Kevin Hoover for his detail
comments. Chao's research was supported by the Taiwan National Science Council (grant no.
NSC100-2628-H-007-023-MY2).
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6 For the study of causal images, see Chen ( 2011 ).