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- Stathos Psillos, Defending Deductive Nomology.In recent years philosophy of science has seen a resurgence of interest in metaphysical issues, especially those concerning laws, causation,and explanation. Although this book takes only the latter two words for its title, it is also about laws of nature. It is divided into three sections: the first is on causation, the second is on laws, and the third is on explanation: this is entirely appropriate because the debates about them are closely related. Ever since Hume argued that causation is nothing more than regularities, laws have been more respectable than causes in philosophy. Perhaps this is also because science is replete with specially named laws which seem to play a central role in theories and explanations. Yet, as many philosophers have recently pointed out, contrary to Russell’s famous pronouncement that causation is a relic of a bygone age (quoted p. 3 by Psillos), the contemporary special sciences are very much concerned with the identification and investigation of all manner of causal structures. This raises the question of whether the apparent causal powers attributed to kinds in the special sciences are anything over and above a way of talking about the result of the operations of physical laws governing their microconstituents. Hence the logical empiricist’s project of showing how the laws of the special sciences reduce to those of physics. On their view, explanation, and in particular causal explanation, is nothing more than argument using the laws of nature as premises. However, this coveringlaw model of explanation has been subjected to intense criticism, and there have been attempts to construct alternatives that rely on the idea that to explain an event is to cite its real cause, where this cause need not be subsumed under any law. Since the demise of logical empiricism, or at least the waning of its influence, there has been a proliferation of theories about laws, causation and explanation, many of which differ radically from one another.
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This paper proposes a revision of our understanding of causation that is designed to address what Hartry Field has suggested is the central problem in the metaphysics of causation today: reconciling Bertrand Russell’s arguments that the concept of causation can play no role in the advanced sciences with Nancy Cartwright’s arguments that causal concepts are essential to a scientific understanding of the world. The paper shows that Russell’s main argument is, ironically, very similar to an argument that Cartwright has put forward against the truth of universal laws of nature. The paper uses this insight to develop an account of causation that does justice to traditional views yet avoids the arguments of Russell.
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| Export citation | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The concept of causation plays a central role in many philosophical theories, and yet no account of causation has gained widespread acceptance among those who have investigated its foundations. Theories based on laws, counterfactuals, physical processes, and probabilistic dependence and independence relations (the list is by no means exhaustive) have all received detailed treatment in recent years—and, while no account has been entirely successful, it is generally agreed that the concept has been greatly clarified by the attempts. In this magnificent book, Woodward aims to give a unified account of causation and causal explanation in terms of the notion of a manipulation (or intervention, terms which can be read interchangeably). Not only does he produce in my view the most illuminating and comprehensive account of causation on offer, his theory also opens a great many avenues for future work in the area, and has ramifications for many other areas of philosophy. Making Things Happen ought to be of interest not only to philosophers of causation and philosophers of science, but to any philosopher whose concerns involve assumptions about the nature of causation, laws, or explanation.
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| | Other links: bweslake.s3.amazonaws.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion.
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| | Other links: cognet.mit.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) appear to have—maybe not surprisingly—different features than the laws of physics. Special science laws—for instance, the economic law “Under the condition of perfect competition, an increase of demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constant” and, in biology, Mendel's Laws—are usually taken to “have exceptions”, to be “non-universal” or “to be ceteris paribus laws”. How and whether the laws of physics and the laws of the special sciences differ is one of the crucial questions motivating the debate on ceteris paribus laws. Another major, controversial question concerns the determination of the precise meaning of “ceteris paribus”. Philosophers have attempted to explicate the meaning of ceteris paribus clauses in different ways. The question of meaning is connected to the problem of empirical content, i.e., the question whether ceteris paribus laws have non-trivial and empirically testable content. Since many philosophers have argued that ceteris paribus laws lack empirically testable content, this problem constitutes a major challenge to a theory of ceteris paribus laws.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... It is often presumed that the laws of nature have special significance for scientific reasoning. But the laws' distinctive roles have proven notoriously difficult to identify--leading some philosophers to question if they hold such roles at all. This study offers original accounts of the roles that natural laws play in connection with counterfactual conditionals, inductive projections, and scientific explanations, and of what the laws must be in order for them to be capable of playing these roles. Particular attention is given to laws of special sciences, levels of scientific explanation, natural kinds, ceteris-paribus clauses, and physically necessary non-laws.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The most recent challenge to the covering-law model of explanation (N. Cartwright, How the laws of Physics Lie) charges that the fundamental explanatory laws are not true. In fact explanation and truth are alleged to pull in different directions. We hold that this gets its force from confusing issues about the truth of the laws in the explanation and the precision with which those laws can yield an exact description of the event to be explained. In defending this we look at Cartwright's major case studies and sketch an amended covering-law model of explanation.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 1 Logical empiricism: Hempel 1.1 Earlier criteria of significance 1.2 Significance as dependent on constitutive terms 1.3 Partially interpreted systems 2 Explanation 2.1 Background: deductive nomological explanation 2.2 Causal explanation 2.3 The pragmatics of explanation 2.4 Theoretical explanation 3 Confirmation 3.1 Hypothetico deductive model 3.2 The new riddle of induction 4 Scientific change 4.1 Kuhn's revolutions 4.2 Darwin's contribution 5 Realism 5.1 Constructive empiricism 5.2 Structural realism 6 Laws 6.1 Laws and mere regularities 6.2 Systems 6.3 Universals 7 Assignments..
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| | Scholar | More options ... The issue of whether there are laws in biology and the “special science”1 has been of interest owing to the debate about whether scientific explanation requires laws. A well-warn argument goes thus: no laws in social science, no explanations, or at least no scientific explanations, at most explanation-sketches. The conclusion is not just a matter of labeling. If explanations are not scientific they are not epistemically or practically reliable. There are at least three well-known diagnoses of where this argument goes wrong. First, the argument that there are no laws in social science adopts an account of laws that is too stringent, one that not even the physical sciences satisfy (Cartwright 1983, Mitchell 2000). On a less stringent definition, there are plenty of laws in social science (and biology). These laws are, sensu Fodor, “non-strict,” as opposed to the “strict laws” (if any—vide Cartwright 1983) of physics. Second, scientific explanation does not require laws, and when laws do explain, they do so because they satisfy some other requirement on scientific explanation, for example unification, or the identification of causal difference-makers (Friedman 1974, Kitcher 1989, Salmon 1984, Strevens 2009). A third view, increasingly attractive among philosophers of social science and biology is due to James Woodward (2000, 2003). This view, like the second one eschews laws and identifies causes as difference makers. On this view explanations do require regularities, but these regularities need only satisfy a requirement of “invariance” under certain specified circumstances, in order to be explanatory, and..
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| | Scholar | More options ... The present essay aims to show how our thinking about explanation has evolved and where it stands now. Its first part presents how some major thinkers, from Aristotle, through to Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Hume and Kant, to Mill, conceived of explanation. The second part offers a systematic examination of the most significant and controversial contemporary models of explanation. The first part starts with Aristotle’s conception—the thought that explanation consists in finding out why something happened and that answering why-questions requires finding causes—which set the agenda for almost all subsequent thinking about explanation. It discusses the links between laws of nature, causation and explanation in the thought of the early modern philosophers and culminates with John Stuart Mill’s first well-worked out model of scientific explanation, which was based on the idea that there is no necessity in nature and that, ultimately, explanation amounts to unification into a comprehensive deductive system, whose axioms capture the fundamental laws of nature. The second part starts with the Logical Empiricists’ attempt to legitimise the concept of causation by subsuming it under the concept of a deductive-nomological argument. It moves on to discuss the reappearance of genuinely causal models of explanation as well as the re-appearance and development of the Millian idea that explanation amounts to unification. It ends with the examination of teleological approaches to explanation.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Leuridan (2010) argued that mechanisms cannot provide a genuine alternative to laws of nature as a model of explanation in the sciences, and advocates Mitchell’s (1997) pragmatic account of laws. I first demonstrate that Leuridan gets the order of priority wrong between mechanisms, regularity, and laws, and then make some clarifying remarks about how laws and mechanisms relate to regularities. Mechanisms are not an explanatory alternative to regularities; they are an alternative to laws. The existence of stable regularities in nature is necessary for either model of explanation: regularities are what laws describe and what mechanisms explain.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Stathos Psillos, Defending deductive nomology
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