Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The total effect that the
smoking
node has upon the
death
node is the maximum of
all the indirect effects; that is, the strongest of all the weakest links. So, the answers
to the posed question
How smoking causes death?
would be:
Fig. 17.7
Automatic answer to the question
How smoking causes death?
17.4
Answering Why-Questions
In [3], Bechtel & Abrahamsen said that: “biologist explains why by explaining
how”. Following this line, our hypothesis is that to answer a
why
-q is not the same,
but it is contained in, the answer to a
how
-question.
As we previously remarked,
why
-questions are frequently related to cover law
explanations. Nevertheless, cover law explanations provide only a partial frame to
obtain answers to
why
-questions in a medical domain, because in this field it is not
frequent to get general laws that always hold [11]. In medicine, mechanisms are
more common than natural laws. Despite this, some characteristics of explanations
are profitable to provide answers to
why
-questions: science, through cover law ex-
planations, is impelled to get at the ultimate causes of phenomena [12]. In this vein,
answers to
why
-questions should pursue the deepest or proximate cause.
