Abstract
‘Possibilist Explanation’ is a promising account of scientific explanation which avoids the familiar problems of “how-possibly explanations”. It explains an event by showing how-actually it was epistemically possible, instead of why it was epistemically necessary. Its explanandum is the epistemic possibility of an actual event previously considered epistemically impossible. To define PE, two new concepts are introduced: ‘permissive condition’ and ‘possibilist law’. A permissive condition for an event is something that does not entail the event itself, but a necessary condition for it. A ‘Possibilist Law’ is a kind of scientific law that predicts that in the absence of a necessary condition N, the event E is not possible. Both PE and PL are legitimate and neglected parts of scientific knowledge and are especially suitable for human sciences.
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Acknowledgements
I am very and especially grateful to Nancy Cartwright for her insightful and sharp comments on some earlier versions of this paper. I am also especially thankful to Pedro Merlussi for his generosity, his many revisions on this work and our instigative conversations about this subject. I am also grateful to the community of philosophers at Durham University for the many exciting and helpful discussions, with many special thanks to the reviews of Nathalie Cadena, Julian Reiss and Rune Nyrup. I also owe thanks to Anna Alexandrova, David Papineau, Marco Ruffino and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and time spent on my work.
Funding
This work was conducted during a scholarship supported by the International Cooperation Program CAPES/COFECUB at Durham University. Financed by CAPES—Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education within the Ministry of Education of Brazil.
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Castañon, G.A. Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How-Possibly Through Laws. Erkenn 86, 835–852 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00134-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00134-1