In this chapter, we discuss how to evaluate evidence of mechanisms. This begins with an account of how a mechanistic study provides evidence for features of specific mechanism hypotheses, laying out a three step procedure of evaluating:(1) the methods used, (2) the implementation of the methods, and (3), the stability of the results. The next step is to combine those evaluations to present the quality of evidence of the general mechanistic claim.Having explained how evidence of mechanisms can be obtained, the next step is to evaluate that evidence, which is the topic of this chapter. In the following chapter will explain how this evaluation can be integrated with an evaluation of evidence for a correlation in order to determine an overall evaluation of the causal claim of interest.
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