Big Data Biology: Between Eliminative Inferences and Exploratory Experiments

Recently, biologists have argued that data-driven biology fosters a new scientific methodology, namely, one that is irreducible to traditional methodologies of molecular biology defined as the discovery strategies elucidated by mechanistic philosophy. Here I show how data-driven studies can be included in the traditional mechanistic approach in two respects. On the one hand, some studies provide eliminative inferential procedures to prioritize and develop mechanistic hypotheses. On the other, different studies play an exploratory role in providing useful generalizations to complement the procedure of prioritization. Overall, this article aims to shed light on the structure of contemporary research in molecular biology.