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The Metarepresentational Role of Mathematics in Scientific Explanations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2022

Colin McCullough-Benner
Colin McCullough-Benner*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
*
Email: C.M.McCullough-Benner@leeds.ac.uk
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Abstract

Several philosophers have argued that to capture the generality of certain scientific explanations, we must count mathematical facts among their explanantia. I argue that we can better understand these explanations by adopting a more nuanced stance toward mathematical representations, recognizing the role of mathematical representation schemata in representing highly abstract features of physical systems. It is by picking out these abstract but nonmathematical features that explanations appealing to mathematics achieve a high degree of generality. The result is a rich conception of the role of mathematics in scientific explanations that does not require us to treat mathematical facts as explanantia.

Type
Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 89 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 742 - 760
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

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