Explanation

Edited by Brad Weslake (New York University, Shanghai)
Assistant editor: Zili Dong (University of Western Ontario)
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  1. Obʺi︠a︡snenie v sot︠s︡ialʹnom poznanii.V. N. Karpovich - 1989 - Novosibirsk: "Nauka," Sibirskoe otd-nie. Edited by O. S. Razumovskiĭ.
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  2. Obʺi︠a︡snenie i ponimanie v spet︠s︡ialʹnykh obshchestvennykh naukakh.V. G. Fedotova, V. V. Denisov, N. N. Kozlova & A. A. Ri︠a︡binkina (eds.) - 1989 - Moskva: Akademii︠a︡ nauk SSSR, In-t filosofii.
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  3. Idealist Panpsychism and Spacetime Structure.Damian Aleksiev - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association.
    This paper presents a novel argument against one theoretically attractive form of panpsychism. I argue that “idealist panpsychism” is false since it cannot account for spacetime’s structure. Idealist panpsychists posit that fundamental reality is purely experiential. Moreover, they posit that the consciousness at the fundamental level metaphysically grounds and explains both the facts of physics and the facts of human consciousness. I argue that if idealist panpsychism is true, human consciousness and the consciousness at the fundamental level will have the (...)
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  4. Obʺi︠a︡snenie, ponimanie, i︠a︡zyk.V. I. Medvedev - 1997 - Sankt-Peterburg: Stupeni.
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  5. Erklären als didaktisches Handeln.Ewald Kiel - 1999 - Würzburg: Ergon.
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  6. Causal Explanations and XAI.Sander Beckers - 2022 - Proceedings of the 1St Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning, Pmlr.
    Although standard Machine Learning models are optimized for making predictions about observations, more and more they are used for making predictions about the results of actions. An important goal of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is to compensate for this mismatch by offering explanations about the predictions of an ML-model which ensure that they are reliably action-guiding. As action-guiding explanations are causal explanations, the literature on this topic is starting to embrace insights from the literature on causal models. Here I take (...)
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  7. Kausalität und Objektivität bei Hegel.Ansgar Lyssy - 2020 - Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 3:711-739.
    The concept of causality is central to the assessment of numerous related metaphysical and epistemic positions, in Hegel and elsewhere. The present essay tries 1) to understand Hegel’s critique of the merely categorically understood concept of causality; 2) to uncover the theoretical structure that must accompany the categorical concept of causality in order to avoid the problems mentioned above; and 3) to argue that such a theory of causality has a fundamental function for Hegel’s conception of objectivity.
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  8. Filosofii︠a︡ i︠a︡zyka: ocherki istorii.Vladimir Ivanovich Medvedev - 2012 - Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatelʹstvo RKhGA.
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  9. Tableau-resolution based description abduction logics: An A-Box Abduction Problem Solver in Artificial Intelligence.Seyed Ahmad Mirsanei - 2023 - In The 9th International TMU Student Philosophy Conference. Tehran: Tarbiat Modares University - Department of Philosophy. pp. 133-137.
    By introducing and extending description logic (DLs) and growing up their application in knowledge representation and especially in OWLs and semantic web scope, many shortcomings and bugs were identified that weren’t resolvable in classical DLs and so logicians and computer scientists intended to non-classical and non-monotonic reasoning tools. In this paper, I discuses about abduction problem solvers, and by introducing A-Box abduction in description logics (DLs), such as ALC, discuss about decidability and complexity in different introduced algorithms, and report shortly (...)
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  10. Standard Aberration: Cancer Biology and the Modeling Account of Normal Function.Seth Goldwasser - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (1):(4) 1-33.
    Cancer biology features the ascription of normal functions to parts of cancers. At least some ascriptions of function in cancer biology track local normality of parts within the global abnormality of the aberration to which those parts belong. That is, cancer biologists identify as functions activities that, in some sense, parts of cancers are supposed to perform, despite cancers themselves having no purpose. The present paper provides a theory to accommodate these normal function ascriptions—I call it the Modeling Account of (...)
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  11. Modelos estadísticos y explicación del error inferencial.Lucas Miranda Baños - 2022 - Culturas Cientificas 3 (2):151-167.
    La tesis principal de este trabajo es que los modelos estadísticos facilitan explicaciones acerca de los errores que pueden cometer nuestros procedimientos de inferencia de datos a fenómenos, en el contexto de la estadística clásica o frecuentista. La explicación del error es una operación que, a su vez, ayuda a evitarlo en donde es evitable e intolerable; tolerarlo donde es inevitable y tolerable; y suspender el juicio donde es inevitable e intolerable. Todas estas operaciones son elementos de una práctica generadora (...)
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  12. Philosophy's Role in Theorizing Psychopathology.Quinn Hiroshi Gibson - forthcoming - Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology.
    It is a mistake to think that any philosophical contribution to the study of psychopathology is otiose. I identify three non-exhaustive roles that philosophy can and does occupy in the study of mental disorder, which I call the agenda-setting role, the synthetic role, and the regulative role. The three roles are illustrated via consideration of the importance of Jaspers’ notion of understanding and its application to specific examples of mental disorder, including delusions of reference, Capgras delusion and other monothematic delusions, (...)
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  13. O raciocínio abdutivo no contexto da explicação científica.Ulisses Eliano - 2022 - Dissertation, Unicamp - Universidade Estadual de Campinas
    Este trabalho tem como principal objetivo apresentar uma abordagem lógico-formal capaz de apreender alguns aspectos do raciocínio abdutivo – o raciocínio responsável pela criação de hipóteses explicativas para fatos surpreendentes -, mediante tanto as noções filosófico-conceituais da canônica abdução peirceana quanto as de explicação científica. No caso desta última, procurarei evidenciar, inicialmente, pontos de contraste entre as concepções de explicação científica de Aristóteles e de Carl Hempel, a fim de elucidar, de modo mais satisfatório, em que medida, de fato, teorias (...)
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  14. Link Uncertainty, Implementation, and ML Opacity: A Reply to Tamir and Shech.Emily Sullivan - 2022 - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation. Routledge. pp. 341-345.
    This chapter responds to Michael Tamir and Elay Shech’s chapter “Understanding from Deep Learning Models in Context.”.
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  15. Explanatory reasoning in the material theory of induction.William Peden - 2022 - Metascience 31 (3):303-309.
    In his recent book, John Norton has created a theory of inference to the best explanation, within the context of his "material theory of induction". I apply it to the problem of scientific explanations that are false: if we want the theories in our explanations to be true, then why do historians and scientists often say that false theories explained phenomena? I also defend Norton's theory against some possible objections.
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  16. From Unobservable to Observable: Scientific Realism and the Discovery of Radium.Simon Allzén - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (4):307-321.
    I explore the process of changes in the observability of entities and objects in science and how such changes impact two key issues in the scientific realism debate: the claim that predictively successful elements of past science are retained in current scientific theories, and the inductive defense of a specific version of inference to the best explanation with respect to unobservables. I provide a case-study of the discovery of radium by Marie Curie in order to show that the observability of (...)
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  17. Obi︠a︡snenie, razbirane i izvod.Lilii︠a︡ Gurova - 2019 - Sofii︠a︡: Nov bŭlgarski universitet.
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  18. Emergence in Context: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy.Robert C. Bishop - 2022 - Oxford University Press. Edited by Michael Silberstein & Mark Pexton.
    "Science, philosophy of science, and metaphysics have long been concerned with the question of how novel things emerge. How can order come out of disorder? This book introduces a new account, contextual emergence, seeking to answer such questions."--Back cover.
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  19. Grounding, Explanation, and the Tasks of Metaphysics.Daniel Nolan - forthcoming - In Aaron Segal & Nick Stang (eds.), Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Thinking about metaphysical problems in terms of grounding has its uses, but those uses are limited. This paper argues against attempts to see issues of grounding as having a central and organising role in metaphysical inquiry. After arguing that grounding does some useful work, this paper will argue that grounding is neither the central tool for understanding explanation in metaphysics, nor defines the subject matter of metaphysics. Instead, grounding tracks only some of the metaphysical explanations we should be looking for, (...)
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  20. Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences.Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.) - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This volume brings together leading scholars working on understanding and representation in philosophy of science. It features a critical conversation format between contributors that advances debates concerning scientific understanding, scientific representation, and their delicate interplay.
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  21. "It is of the nature of reason to regard things as necessary, not as contingent": A Defense of Spinoza's Necessitarianism.Brandon Rdzak - 2021 - Dissertation, Purdue University
    There is longstanding interpretive dispute between commentators over Spinoza’s commitment to necessitarianism, the doctrine that all things are metaphysically necessary and none are contingent. Those who affirm Spinoza’s commitment to the doctrine adhere to the necessitarian interpretation whereas those who deny it adhere to what I call the semi-necessitarian interpretation. As things stand, the disagreement between commentators appears to have reached an impasse. Notwithstanding, there seems to be no disagreement among commentators on the question of necessitarianism’s philosophical plausibility as a (...)
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  22. Philosophy of Science.Alik Pelman - 2022 - Israel: Open University Press.
  23. Science and the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Du Châtelet contra Wolff.Aaron Wells - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1):24–53.
    I argue that Émilie Du Châtelet breaks with Christian Wolff regarding the scope and epistemological content of the principle of sufficient reason, despite his influence on her basic ontology and their agreement that the principle of sufficient reason has foundational importance. These differences have decisive consequences for the ways in which Du Châtelet and Wolff conceive of science.
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  24. Grasping in Understanding.Miloud Belkoniene - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    There is, among philosophers involved in the debate concerning the nature and epistemology of understanding, a general recognition that this state has a grasping component that accounts for some of its distinctive features. This paper defends the view that this component of understanding consists of a knowledge of how to use a particular explanation to account for a given phenomenon. The way in which a subject acquires this knowledge is examined and the result of this examination is shown to highlight (...)
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  25. Microbiome causality: further reflections.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (2):1-16.
  26. How causal are microbiomes? A comparison with the Helicobacter pylori explanation of ulcers.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):62.
    Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...)
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  27. How causal are microbiomes? A comparison with the Helicobacter pylori explanation of ulcers.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):62.
    Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...)
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  28. How causal are microbiomes? A comparison with the H elicobacter pylori explanation of ulcers.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):62.
    Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...)
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  29. Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography: Causal and Teleological Approaches.Gunnar Schumann (ed.) - 2019 - New York: Routledge.
    Is the appropriate form of human action explanation causal or rather teleological? While this is a central question in analytic philosophy of action, it also has implications for the question whether there are differences in principle between the methods of explanation in the sciences on the one hand and in the humanities and the social sciences on the other. The question bears on the problem of the appropriate form of explanations of past human actions, and therefore it is prominently discussed (...)
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  30. causal reasoning about genetics: synthesis and future directions.Kate E. Lynch, Ilan Dar Nimrod, Paul Edmund Griffiths & James Morandini - 2019 - Behavior Genetics 2 (49):221-234.
    When explaining the causes of human behavior, genes are often given a special status. They are thought to relate to an intrinsic human 'essence', and essentialist biases have been shown to skew the way in which causation is assessed. Causal reasoning in general is subject to other pre-existing biases, including beliefs about normativity and morality. In this synthesis we show how factors which influence causal reasoning can be mapped to a framework of genetic essentialism, which reveals both the shared and (...)
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  31. Why microbes, not microbiomes, are better causal explanations in gut-brain research.Kate E. Lynch - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42.
    Much microbiota-gut-brain research focuses on the causal role of microbiomes as a whole, rather than their component parts: microbes. Hooks et al. find these whole-community explanations inadequate; however, they do not provide suggestions for better explanations. By appealing to proportionality – a criterion that can be used to develop more appropriate causal explanations – more accurate causal claims can be made.
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  32. The Role of Chance in Explanation.Bradford Skow - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (1):103-123.
    ‘Those ice cubes melted because by melting total entropy increased and entropy increase has a very high objective chance.’ What role does the chance in this explanation play? I argue that it contributes to the explanation by entailing that the melting was almost necessary, and defend the claim that the fact that some event was almost necessary can, in the right circumstances, constitute a causal explanation of that event.
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  33. Causation, Explanation, and the Metaphysics of Aspect.Bradford Skow - 2018 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Bradford Skow examines important philosophical questions about causation and explanation. His answers rely on a pair of connected distinctions: the distinction between acting and not acting, and that between situations in which an event happens and when something is in some state.
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  34. Against Understanding (as a condition on explanation).Bradford Skow - 2017 - In Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding. Oxford University Press.
    Argues that there is no interpretation of the commonly-accepted idea that "explanation is that which produces understanding" on which it is of any use for finding what philosophers looking for a theory of explanation have been after. Contains a close examination of a couple of philosophers' attempts to use this idea for that purpose.
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  35. Interpreting Heritability Causally.Kate E. Lynch & Pierrick Bourrat - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (1):14-34.
    A high heritability estimate usually corresponds to a situation in which trait variation is largely caused by genetic variation. However, in some cases of gene-environment covariance, causal intuitions about the sources of trait difference can vary, leading experts to disagree as to how the heritability estimate should be interpreted. We argue that the source of contention for these cases is an inconsistency in the interpretation of the concepts ‘genotype’, ‘phenotype’, and ‘environment’. We propose an interpretation of these terms under which (...)
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  36. Reasons Why.Bradford Skow - 2016 - Oxford, England and New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press UK.
    This book first argues that what philosophers are really after, or at least should be after, when they seek a theory of explanation, is a theory of answers to why-questions. The book's main thesis, then, is a theory of reasons why. Every reason why some event happened is either a cause, or a ground, of that event. Challenging this thesis are many examples philosophers have thought they have found of "non-causal explanations." Reasons Why uses two ideas to show that these (...)
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  37. Can a Theory Answer more Questions than one of its Rivals?Adolf Grünbaum - 1976 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27 (1):1-23.
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  38. La razón de los vencidos.Reyes Mate - 1991 - Barcelona: Anthropos.
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  39. L'éthique reconstructive.Jean-Marc Ferry - 1996 - Paris: Cerf.
    Narration ou argumentation? Une nouvelle polarité philosophique se dessine ainsi, chargée d'enjeux relatifs à la question de l'éthique. Par la mise en récit des expériences, la narration confère à l'identité personnelle un ancrage et une épaisseur historiques, orientant l'éthique vers un idéal substantiel de vie bonne. Par la justification rationnelle des réclamations, l'argumentation engage la responsabilité des sujets de droit, infléchissant l'éthique vers une idée procédurale de la société juste. Mais comment articuler la visée substantielle à la voie procédurale? Comment (...)
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  40. What is an element? What is the periodic table? And what does quantum mechanics contribute to the question?Eric R. Scerri - 2011 - Foundations of Chemistry 14 (1):69-81.
    This article considers two important traditions concerning the chemical elements. The first is the meaning of the term “element” including the distinctions between element as basic substance, as simple substance and as combined simple substance. In addition to briefly tracing the historical development of these distinctions, I make comments on the recent attempts to clarify the fundamental notion of element as basic substance for which I believe the term “element” is best reserved. This discussion has focused on the writings of (...)
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  41. The nature of nature: examining the role of naturalism in science.Bruce Gordon & William A. Dembski (eds.) - 2011 - Wilmington, DE: ISI Books.
    The world's leading authorities in the sciences and humanities—dozens of top scholars, including three Nobel laureates—join a cultural and intellectual battle that leaves no human life untouched. Is the universe self-existent, self-sufficient, and self-organizing, or is it grounded instead in a reality that transcends space, time, matter, and energy?
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Theories of Explanation
  1. Moral Theory.Douglas W. Portmore - manuscript
    This is the first chapter of a book that I'm writing entitled Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends. The chapter has six sections: (1) The Distinction between a Moral Theory and a Complete Account of Morality, (2) The Best Explanation, (3) Fitting the Data as Opposed to the Facts, (4) Epistemic Justification and Phenomenal Conservatism, (5) Neither Overfitting nor Underfitting the Data, and (6) Trusting Our Moral Intuitions. Thus, the chapter begins by providing an account of what a moral theory is (...)
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  2. La Ley y El Orden: Sobre Dos Sorprendentes (¡y Extendidos!) Errores En la Enseñanza de Las Ciencias Naturales.Claudio Cormick & Valeria Edelsztein - 2022 - Anales de la Asociación Química Argentina 109 (Número extra):223-229.
    It does not seem particularly daring to say that one objective of science education is to enable students to understand different phenomena in the world in their mutual relationship. This is roughly equivalent to promoting knowledge of scientific explanations, which involve resorting to regular relationships between certain phenomena and which, certainly, is different from knowledge of this or that type of event taken in isolation. In this text, we will draw attention to two opposing tendencies that, however, tend towards the (...)
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  3. Explanatory Depth in Primordial Cosmology: A Comparative Study of Inflationary and Bouncing Paradigms.William J. Wolf & Karim P. Y. Thebault - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    We develop and apply a multi-dimensional conception of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial condition fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches respectively. In (...)
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  4. That’s Not IBE: Reply to Park.Yunus Prasetya - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (2):621-627.
    Park (2017, 2018, 2019) argues that Bas van Fraassen uses inference to the best explanation to defend his contextual theory of explanation. If Park is right, then van Fraassen is in trouble because he rejects IBE as a rational rule of inference. In this reply, I argue that van Fraassen does not use IBE in defending the contextual theory of explanation. I distinguish between several conceptions of IBE: heuristic IBE, objective Bayesian IBE, and ampliative IBE. I argue that van Fraassen (...)
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  5. Inference to the Best Explanation - An Overview.Frank Cabrera - 2022 - In Lorenzo Magnani (ed.), Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Cham: Springer. pp. 1-34.
    In this article, I will provide a critical overview of the form of non-deductive reasoning commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Roughly speaking, according to IBE, we ought to infer the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of our evidence. In section 2, I survey some contemporary formulations of IBE and highlight some of its putative applications. In section 3, I distinguish IBE from C.S. Peirce’s notion of abduction. After underlining some of the essential elements of IBE, (...)
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  6. A Defence of Manipulationist Noncausal Explanation: The Case for Intervention Liberalism.Nicholas Emmerson - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    Recent years have seen growing interest in modifying interventionist accounts of causal explanation in order to characterise noncausal explanation. However, one surprising element of such accounts is that they have typically jettisoned the core feature of interventionism: interventions. Indeed, the prevailing opinion within the philosophy of science literature suggests that interventions exclusively demarcate causal relationships. This position is so prevalent that, until now, no one has even thought to name it. We call it “intervention puritanism” (I-puritanism, for short). In this (...)
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  7. Explaining coincidences.Julio De Rizzo - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14843-14864.
    A traditional account of coincidences has it that two facts are coincidental whenever they are not related as cause and effect and do not have a common cause. A recent contribution by Lando : 132–151, 2017) showed that this account is mistaken. In this paper, I argue against two alternative accounts of coincidences, one suggested by Lando, and another by Bhogal : 677–694, 2020), and defend a third one in their place. In short, I propose that how explanatory links relate (...)
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  8. Correction to: Reply to Cartwright, Pemberton, Wieten: “mechanisms, laws and explanation”.Beate Krickel - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-2.
    A Correction to this paper has been published (changed to open access).
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  9. The Directionality of Topological Explanations.Daniel Kostić & Kareem Khalifa - 2021 - Synthese (5-6):14143-14165.
    Proponents of ontic conceptions of explanation require all explanations to be backed by causal, constitutive, or similar relations. Among their justifications is that only ontic conceptions can do justice to the ‘directionality’ of explanation, i.e., the requirement that if X explains Y , then not-Y does not explain not-X . Using topological explanations as an illustration, we argue that non-ontic conceptions of explanation have ample resources for securing the directionality of explanations. The different ways in which neuroscientists rely on multiplexes (...)
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