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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research

Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research

Bechtel, William
Richardson, Robert C.

Paperback

General ScienceHistory & Philosophy of Science

ISBN10: 0262514737
ISBN13: 9780262514736
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Aug 6 2010
Pages: 340
Weight: 1.03
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.32 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences.

In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of choice points that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility--the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized.

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