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Mechanist (or mechanical) philosophy, in the original sense, meant the rejection of "substantial forms", i.e. forms with causal powers, such as souls, postulated by scholastics (who drew on some vague passages from Aristotle's De Anima). For a detailed discussion of substantial forms see How can the soul be a form in Aristotle's metaphysics? From the modern ...
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Interpreted narrowly, your question seems related to the problem of (data) fishing, where someone investigates hypothesis after hypothesis on the data until getting statistical significance on one (without correcting for the number of hypotheses considered), so that in all likelihood it was just a fluke. This is a well understood problem.
Interpreted more ...
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