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  1. Levels of reasons why and answers to why questions.Insa Lawler - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (1):168-177.
    According to Skow (2016, 2017), correct answers to why-questions only cite causes or grounds, but not non-accidental regularities. Accounts that cite non-accidental regularities typically confuse second-level reasons with first-level reasons. Only causes and grounds are first-level reasons why. Non-accidental regularities are second-level reasons why. I first show that Skow's arguments for the accusation of confusion depend on the independent thesis that only citations of first-level reasons why are (parts of) answers to why-questions. Then, I argue that this thesis is false. (...)
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  • Explanations by Constraint: Not Just in Physics.Marc Lange - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (4):265-277.
    Several philosophers have argued that ‘constraints’ constrain (and thereby explain) by virtue of being modally stronger than ordinary laws of nature. In this way, a constraint applies to all possible systems, for a variety of possibility that is broader (that is, more inclusive) than the variety we employ when we say that the ordinary laws of nature apply to all physically possible systems. Explanations by constraint are thus more broadly unifying than ordinary causal explanations. Philosophical examples of good candidates for (...)
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  • Not so distinctively mathematical explanations: topology and dynamical systems.Aditya Jha, Douglas Campbell, Clemency Montelle & Phillip L. Wilson - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-40.
    So-called ‘distinctively mathematical explanations’ (DMEs) are said to explain physical phenomena, not in terms of contingent causal laws, but rather in terms of mathematical necessities that constrain the physical system in question. Lange argues that the existence of four or more equilibrium positions of any double pendulum has a DME. Here we refute both Lange’s claim itself and a strengthened and extended version of the claim that would pertain to any n-tuple pendulum system on the ground that such explanations are (...)
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  • Causation in Science, by Yemima Ben-Menahem.Matt Farr - 2021 - Mind 132 (528):1176-1185.
    Whatever you think of Bertrand Russell’s famous claim that the ‘law of causality’ is (at least as of 1912) redundant in the ‘advanced sciences’, it is nonethele.
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