Racial disparities in health outcomes have recently become a flashpoint in the debate about the value of race as a biological concept. What role, if any, race has in the etiology of disease is a philosophically and scientifically contested topic. In this article, I expand on the insights of the new mechanistic philosophy of science to defend a mechanism discovery approach to investigating epidemiological racial disparities. The mechanism discovery approach has explanatory virtues lacking in the populational approach typically employed in the study of race and biomedicine. The explanatory constraints that form an integral part of the new mechanistic approach enable mechanism discovery to avoid the epistemic and normative shortcomings of the populational approach. The methodology of mechanism discovery can fruitfully be extended to the treatment and reversal of epidemiological racial disparities.

中文翻译：

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新机械科学哲学中的种族与医学

健康结果中的种族差异最近成为关于种族作为生物学概念的价值的争论的焦点。种族在疾病病因学中的作用（如果有的话）是一个哲学上和科学上有争议的话题。在本文中，我扩展了新机械科学哲学的见解，以捍卫一种机制发现方法来调查流行病学种族差异。机制发现方法具有解释性优点，这是种族和生物医学研究中通常采用的群体方法所缺乏的。构成新机制方法不可或缺的一部分的解释性约束使机制发现能够避免总体方法的认知和规范缺陷。