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  1. Toward a Philosophy of Systems Biology.Jonathan F. Davies & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (4):420-422.
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  • Factores causales invariantes en ciencias sociales y su importancia en la implementación de políticas. Una visión crítica.Leonardo Ivarola - 2016 - Signos Filosóficos 18 (35).
    Las corrientes manipulabilistas tradicionales consideran que una implementación de política efectiva debe estar fundamentada en un conocimiento invariante. Este modo de pensamiento está basado en el supuesto ontológico de que existen factores causales estables tanto en las ciencias naturales como en las sociales. También asumen que un sólo tipo de intervención ex-ante es pertinente para una implementación efectiva. En el presente artículo se realizará una crítica a estos enfoques. En particular, se mostrará que los procesos sociales responden a una lógica (...)
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  • Exploring the Effect of Embedded Scaffolding Within Curricular Tasks on Third-Grade Students’ Model-Based Explanations about Hydrologic Cycling.Laura Zangori, Cory T. Forbes & Christina V. Schwarz - 2015 - Science & Education 24 (7-8):957-981.
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  • Modelling Molecular Mechanisms: A Framework of Scientific Reasoning to Construct Molecular-Level Explanations for Cellular Behaviour.Marc H. W. van Mil, Dirk Jan Boerwinkel & Arend Jan Waarlo - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (1):93-118.
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  • Mechanism or Bust? Explanation in Psychology.Lawrence A. Shapiro - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science:axv062.
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  • Natural Selection, Mechanism, and the Statistical Interpretation.Fermín C. Fulda - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):1080-1092.
    What is natural selection? I address this question by exploring the relation between two debates: Is natural selection a mechanism? Is natural selection a causal or a statistical theory? I argue that the first can be assessed only relative to a model and that, following the second, there are two fundamentally different and independent kinds of models, Modern-Synthesis and Darwinian models. MS-models, I argue, are not mechanistic even if they are causal. D-models, in contrast, are mechanistic. A causal-mechanistic interpretation of (...)
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  • Conceptual Reconstruction and Epistemic Import: Allosteric Mechanistic Explanations as a Unified Theory-Net.Karina Alleva, José Díez & Lucía Federico - 2017 - Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 49 (146):5-36.
    The goal of this article is to show that formal analysis and reconstructions may be useful to discuss and shed light on substantive meta-theoretical issues. We proceed here by exemplification, analysing and reconstructing as a case study a paradigmatic biochemical theory, the Monod-Wyman-Changeux theory of allosterism, and applying the reconstruction to the discussion of some issues raised by prominent representatives of the new mechanist philosophy. We conclude that our study shows that at least in this case mechanicism and more traditional (...)
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  • Multiple realization and multiple “ways” of realization: A progress report.Kenneth Aizawa - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 68:3-9.
    One might have thought that if something has two or more distinct realizations, then that thing is multiply realized. Nevertheless, some philosophers have claimed that two or more distinct realizations do not amount to multiple realization, unless those distinct realizations amount to multiple “ways” of realizing the thing. Corey Maley, Gualtiero Piccinini, Thomas Polger, and Lawrence Shapiro are among these philosophers. Unfortunately, they do not explain why multiple realization requires multiple “ways” of realizing. More significantly, their efforts to articulate multiple (...)
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  • The Journey from Discovery to Scientific Change: Scientific Communities, Shared Models, and Specialised Vocabulary.Sarah M. Roe - 2017 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 31 (1):47-67.
    Scientific communities as social groupings and the role that such communities play in scientific change and the production of scientific knowledge is currently under debate. I examine theory change as a complex social interaction among individual scientists and the scientific community, and argue that individuals will be motivated to adopt a more radical or innovative attitude when confronted with striking similarities between model systems and a more robust understanding of specialised vocabulary. Two case studies from the biological sciences, Barbara McClintock (...)
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  • Evidence of mechanism in the evaluation of streptomycin and thalidomide.Donald Gillies - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 66:55-62.
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  • The Brain as an Input–Output Model of the World.Oron Shagrir - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (1):53-75.
    An underlying assumption in computational approaches in cognitive and brain sciences is that the nervous system is an input–output model of the world: Its input–output functions mirror certain relations in the target domains. I argue that the input–output modelling assumption plays distinct methodological and explanatory roles. Methodologically, input–output modelling serves to discover the computed function from environmental cues. Explanatorily, input–output modelling serves to account for the appropriateness of the computed function to the explanandum information-processing task. I compare very briefly the (...)
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  • On mechanistic reasoning in unexpected places: the case of population genetics.Lucas J. Matthews - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):999-1018.
    A strong case has been made for the role and value of mechanistic reasoning in process-oriented sciences, such as molecular biology and neuroscience. This paper shifts focus to assess the role of mechanistic reasoning in an area where it is neither obvious nor expected: population genetics. Population geneticists abstract away from the causal-mechanical details of individual organisms and, instead, use mathematics to describe population-level, statistical phenomena. This paper, first, develops a framework for the identification of mechanistic reasoning where it is (...)
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  • "Exporting" the knowledge of economic models.Leonardo Ivarola - 2017 - Ideas Y Valores 66 (163):203-222.
    RESUMEN Se critican dos tesis de Nancy Cartwright. Por un lado, se examina el enfoque de las "capacidades" en el campo de lo económico para argumentar que estas responden a la lógica de los "árboles de posibilidades" o resultados de final abierto; por el otro, se ofrece una alternativa al problema de "sobre-restricción" de los modelos económicos para mostrar cómo el gran número de supuestos auxiliares acota las posibilidades de extrapolar las conclusiones obtenidas en el modelo a condiciones distintas de (...)
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  • Decomposing complexity: the discovering of pathway dynamics.Adam White - unknown
    Biochemists often adopt what may be called the “Strategy of Decomposition” for the causal discovery of biochemical pathway dynamic behaviours. This involves decomposing a pathway into a set of isolated parts, which are then analysed separately. It is assumed that knowledge gained of the isolated parts can then be used to explain the dynamic behaviours of the whole pathway. My thesis addresses the extent to which use of the Strategy of Decomposition is warranted. I evaluate two challenges contained in Bechtel (...)
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  • On pain experience, multidisciplinary integration and the level-laden conception of science.Tudor Baetu - 2017 - Synthese:1-20.
    Multidisciplinary models aggregating ‘lower-level’ biological and ‘higher-level’ psychological and social determinants of a phenomenon raise a puzzle. How is the interaction between the physical, the psychological and the social conceptualized and explained? Using biopsychosocial models of pain as an illustration, I argue that these models are in fact level-neutral compilations of empirical findings about correlated and causally relevant factors, and as such they neither assume, nor entail a conceptual or ontological stratification into levels of description, explanation or reality. If inter-level (...)
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  • Interventionist Omissions: A Critical Case Study of Mechanistic Explanation in Biology.Melinda Bonnie Fagan - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (5):1082-1097.
    It is widely assumed that mechanistic explanations are causal explanations. Many prominent new mechanists endorse interventionism as the correct analysis of explanatory causal models in biology and other fields. This article argues that interventionism is not entirely satisfactory in this regard. A case study of Jacob and Monod’s operon model shows that at least some important mechanistic explanations in biology present significant contrasts with the interventionist account. This result motivates a more inclusive approach to mechanistic explanation, allowing for noncausal aspects.
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  • Lineage Explanations: Explaining How Biological Mechanisms Change.Brett Calcott - 2009 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (1):51-78.
    This paper describes a pattern of explanation prevalent in the biological sciences that I call a ‘lineage explanation’. The aim of these explanations is to make plausible certain trajectories of change through phenotypic space. They do this by laying out a series of stages, where each stage shows how some mechanism worked, and the differences between each adjacent stage demonstrates how one mechanism, through minor modifications, could be changed into another. These explanations are important, for though it is widely accepted (...)
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  • No revolution necessary: Neural mechanisms for economics.Carl F. Craver - 2008 - Economics and Philosophy 24 (3):381-406.
    We argue that neuroeconomics should be a mechanistic science. We defend this view as preferable both to a revolutionary perspective, according to which classical economics is eliminated in favour of neuroeconomics, and to a classical economic perspective, according to which economics is insulated from facts about psychology and neuroscience. We argue that, like other mechanistic sciences, neuroeconomics will earn its keep to the extent that it either reconfigures how economists think about decision-making or how neuroscientists think about brain mechanisms underlying (...)
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  • Inferential explanations in biology.Raoul Gervais & Erik Weber - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3):356-364.
    Among philosophers of science, there is now a widespread agreement that the DN model of explanation is poorly equipped to account for explanations in biology. Rather than identifying laws, so the consensus goes, researchers explain biological capacities by constructing a model of the underlying mechanism.We think that the dichotomy between DN explanations and mechanistic explanations is misleading. In this article, we argue that there are cases in which biological capacities are explained without constructing a model of the underlying mechanism. Although (...)
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  • The Mind as Neural Software? Understanding Functionalism, Computationalism, and Computational Functionalism.Gualtiero Piccinini - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2):269-311.
    Defending or attacking either functionalism or computationalism requires clarity on what they amount to and what evidence counts for or against them. My goal here is not to evaluate their plausibility. My goal is to formulate them and their relationship clearly enough that we can determine which type of evidence is relevant to them. I aim to dispel some sources of confusion that surround functionalism and computationalism, recruit recent philosophical work on mechanisms and computation to shed light on them, and (...)
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  • Disentangling Mechanisms from Causes: And the Effects on Science.John Protzko - 2018 - Foundations of Science 23 (1):37-50.
    Despite the miraculous progress of science—it’s practitioners continue to run into mistakes, either discrediting research unduly or making leaps of causal inference where none are warranted. In this we isolate two of the reasons for such behavior involving the misplaced understanding of the role of mechanisms and mechanistic knowledge in the establishment of cause-effect relationships. We differentiate causal knowledge into causes, effects, mechanisms, cause-effect relationships, and causal stories. Failing to understand the role of mechanisms in this picture, including their absence (...)
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  • Intentional concepts in cognitive neuroscience.Samuli Pöyhönen - 2014 - Philosophical Explorations 17 (1):93-109.
    In this article, I develop an account of the use of intentional predicates in cognitive neuroscience explanations. As pointed out by Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, intentional language abounds in neuroscience theories. According to Bennett and Hacker, the subpersonal use of intentional predicates results in conceptual confusion. I argue against this overly strong conclusion by evaluating the contested language use in light of its explanatory function. By employing conceptual resources from the contemporary philosophy of science, I show that although the (...)
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  • ‘Genetic Coding’ Reconsidered : An Analysis of Actual Usage.Ulrich E. Stegmann - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3):707-730.
    This article reconsiders the theoretical role of the genetic code. By drawing on published and unpublished sources from the 1950s, I analyse how the code metaphor was actually employed by the scientists who first promoted its use. The analysis shows that the term ‘code’ picked out mechanism sketches, consisting of more or less detailed descriptions of ordinary molecular components, processes, and structural properties of the mechanism of protein synthesis. The sketches provided how-possibly explanations for the ordering of amino acids by (...)
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  • Extended Mechanistic Explanations: Expanding the Current Mechanistic Conception to Include More Complex Biological Systems.Sarah M. Roe & Bert Baumgaertner - 2017 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (4):517-534.
    Mechanistic accounts of explanation have recently found popularity within philosophy of science. Presently, we introduce the idea of an extended mechanistic explanation, which makes explicit room for the role of environment in explanation. After delineating Craver and Bechtel’s account, we argue this suggestion is not sufficiently robust when we take seriously the mechanistic environment and modeling practices involved in studying contemporary complex biological systems. Our goal is to extend the already profitable mechanistic picture by pointing out the importance of the (...)
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  • Mechanisms, Experiments, and Theory-Ladenness: A Realist–Perspectivalist View.Marco Buzzoni - 2016 - Axiomathes 26 (4):411-427.
    The terms “perspectivism” and “perspectivalism” have been the focus of an intense philosophical discussion with important repercussions for the debate about the role of mechanisms in scientific explanations. However, leading exponents of the new mechanistic philosophy have conceded more than was necessary to the radically subjectivistic perspectivalism, and fell into the opposite error, by retaining not negligible residues of objectivistic views about mechanisms. In order to remove this vacillation between the subjective-cultural and the objective-natural sides of mechanisms, we shall raise (...)
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  • What can polysemy tell us about theories of explanation?Maria Şerban - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (1):41-56.
    Philosophical accounts of scientific explanation are broadly divided into ontic and epistemic views. This paper explores the idea that the lexical ambiguity of the verb to explain and its nominalisation supports an ontic conception of explanation (Salmon 1989; Craver 2007). I analyse one argument which challenges this strategy by criticising the claim that explanatory talk is lexically ambiguous (Wright, European Journal of Philosophy of Science 2(3), 375–394, 2012). I propose that the linguistic mechanism of transfer of meaning (Nunberg, Journal of (...)
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  • The Architecture of Personality.Daniel Cervone - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (1):183-204.
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  • Mechanisms and Difference-Making.Stefan Dragulinescu - 2017 - Acta Analytica 32 (1):29-54.
    I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine, as the EBM+ research group has (...)
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  • On computational explanations.Anna-Mari Rusanen & Otto Lappi - 2016 - Synthese 193 (12):3931-3949.
    Computational explanations focus on information processing required in specific cognitive capacities, such as perception, reasoning or decision-making. These explanations specify the nature of the information processing task, what information needs to be represented, and why it should be operated on in a particular manner. In this article, the focus is on three questions concerning the nature of computational explanations: What type of explanations they are, in what sense computational explanations are explanatory and to what extent they involve a special, “independent” (...)
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  • A Cautionary Contribution to the Philosophy of Explanation in the Cognitive Neurosciences.A. Nicolás Venturelli - 2016 - Minds and Machines 26 (3):259-285.
    I propose a cautionary assessment of the recent debate concerning the impact of the dynamical approach on philosophical accounts of scientific explanation in the cognitive sciences and, particularly, the cognitive neurosciences. I criticize the dominant mechanistic philosophy of explanation, pointing out a number of its negative consequences: In particular, that it doesn’t do justice to the field’s diversity and stage of development, and that it fosters misguided interpretations of dynamical models’ contribution. In order to support these arguments, I analyze a (...)
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  • Identity, reduction, and conserved mechanisms: Perspectives from circadian rhythm research.William Bechtel - 2012 - In Simone Gozzano & Christopher S. Hill (eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 43.
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  • A weakened mechanism is still a mechanism: On the causal role of absences in mechanistic explanation.Alexander Mebius - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45:43-48.
    Much contemporary debate on the nature of mechanisms centers on the issue of modulating negative causes. One type of negative causability, which I refer to as "causation by absence," appears difficult to incorporate into modern accounts of mechanistic explanation. This paper argues that a recent attempt to resolve this problem, proposed by Benjamin Barros, requires improvement as it overlooks the fact that not all absences qualify as sources of mechanism failure. I suggest that there are a number of additional types (...)
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  • Irretrievably confused? Innateness in explanatory context.Jonathan Birch - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (4):296-301.
    The hunt for a biologically respectable definition for the folk concept of innateness is still on. I defend Ariew’s Canalization account of innateness against the criticisms of Griffiths and Machery, but highlight the remaining flaws in this proposal. I develop a new analysis based on the notion of environmental induction. A trait is innate, I argue, iff it is not environmentally induced. I augment this definition with a novel analysis of environmental induction that draws on the contrastive nature of causal (...)
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  • Relations among fields: Mendelian, cytological and molecular mechanisms.Lindley Darden - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):349-371.
    Philosophers have proposed various kinds of relations between Mendelian genetics and molecular biology: reduction, replacement, explanatory extension. This paper argues that the two fields are best characterized as investigating different, serially integrated, hereditary mechanisms. The mechanisms operate at different times and contain different working entities. The working entities of the mechanisms of Mendelian heredity are chromosomes, whose movements serve to segregate alleles and independently assort genes in different linkage groups. The working entities of numerous mechanisms of molecular biology are larger (...)
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  • Modeling mechanisms.Stuart Glennan - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):443-464.
    Philosophers of science increasingly believe that much of science is concerned with understanding the mechanisms responsible for the production of natural phenomena. An adequate understanding of scientific research requires an account of how scientists develop and test models of mechanisms. This paper offers a general account of the nature of mechanical models, discussing the representational relationship that holds between mechanisms and their models as well as the techniques that can be used to test and refine such models. The analysis is (...)
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  • Explanation and the Hard Problem.Wayne Wright - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 132 (2):301-330.
    This paper argues that the form of explanation at issue in the hard problem of consciousness is scientifically irrelevant, despite appearances to the contrary. In particular, it is argued that the 'sense of understanding' that plays a critical role in the form of explanation implicated in the hard problem provides neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition on satisfactory scientific explanation. Considerations of the actual tools and methods available to scientists are used to make the case against it being a (...)
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  • What’s behind a smile? the return of mechanism: Reply to Schaffner.Luc Faucher - 2006 - Synthese 151 (3):403-409.
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  • Ephemeral Mechanisms and Historical Explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2010 - Erkenntnis 72 (2):251-266.
    While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation over laws and nomological explanation, paradigmatic mechanisms—e.g., clocks or synapses—actually exhibit a great deal of stability in their behavior. And while mechanisms of this kind are certainly of great importance, there are many events that do not occur as a consequence of the operation of stable mechanisms. Events of natural and human history are often the consequence of causal processes that are ephemeral and (...)
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  • When is it Mental?Stuart Glennan - 2015 - Humana Mente 8 (29).
    Most philosophical debate over mental causation has been concerned with reconciling commonsense intuitions that there are causal interactions between the mental and the physical with philosophical theories of the nature of the mental that seem to suggest otherwise. My concern is with a different and more practical problem. We often confront some cognitive, affective, or bodily phenomenon, and wonder about its source – its etiology or its underlying causal basis. For instance, you might wonder whether your queasiness due to something (...)
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  • Explanation without invariance: The case of socioeconomic processes.Leonardo Ivarola - 2015 - Cinta de Moebio 54:266-277.
    The main models of scientific explanation assume the need for some kind of stable knowledge for assembling a good explanatory argument. While these approaches are useful in the natural sciences, it is doubtful that they are similarly applicable in the socioeconomic realm. In this paper it is expected to show that the logic of socioeconomic processes of being "possibility trees" or "open-ended results" makes regularities the exception rather than the rule. Alternatively, a mode of explanation that focuses on contextual factors (...)
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  • From interventions to mechanistic explanations.Tudor M. Baetu - 2016 - Synthese 193 (10).
    An important strategy in the discovery of biological mechanisms involves the piecing together of experimental results from interventions. However, if mechanisms are investigated by means of ideal interventions, as defined by James Woodward and others, then the kind of information revealed is insufficient to discriminate between modular and non-modular causal contributions. Ideal interventions suffice for constructing webs of causal dependencies that can be used to make some predictions about experimental outcomes, but tell us little about how causally relevant factors are (...)
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  • Aspectos ontológicos y epistémicos de los procesos económicos basados en expectativas. Hacia una ampliación de la agenda en la filosofía de la economía moderna.Leonardo Ivarola - 2015 - Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 23:68-92.
    La filosofía estándar de la economía presupone que en el dominio de los fenómenos económicos subyacen regularidades estables, las cuales pueden explicarse mediante el funcionamiento de mecanismos o de máquinas socioeconómicas. Asimismo, se considera que una vez puestos en funcionamiento, su comportamiento no necesita de subsecuentes intervenciones. Esto implica asumir que los procesos socioeconómicos tienen una naturaleza semejante a los de las ciencias naturales. No obstante, dichas regularidades son por lo general examinadas a la luz de algún modelo económico, por (...)
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  • The ontic conception of scientific explanation.Cory Wright - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 54:20-30.
    Wesley Salmon’s version of the ontic conception of explanation is a main historical root of contemporary work on mechanistic explanation. This paper examines and critiques the philosophical merits of Salmon’s version, and argues that his conception’s most fundamental construct is either fundamentally obscure, or else reduces to a non-ontic conception of explanation. Either way, the ontic conception is a misconception.
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  • Causal inquiry in the social sciences: the promise of process tracing.Rosa Runhardt - 2015 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    In this thesis I investigate causal inquiry in the social sciences, drawing on examples from various disciplines and in particular from conflict studies. In a backlash against the pervasiveness of statistical methods, in the last decade certain social scientists have focused on finding the causal mechanisms behind observed correlations. To provide evidence for such mechanisms, researchers increasingly rely on ‘process tracing’, a method which attempts to give evidence for causal relations by specifying the chain of events connecting a putative cause (...)
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  • When Is a Mechanistic Explanation Satisfactory? Reductionism and Antireductionism in the Context of Mechanistic Explanations.Tudor Băetu - 2015 - In Alexandru Manafu (ed.), The Prospects for Fusion Emergence. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 313: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 313.
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  • Collaborative explanation and biological mechanisms.Melinda Bonnie Fagan - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 52:67-78.
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  • Explaining Cognitive Phenomena with Internal Representations: A Mechanistic Perspective.Paweł Gładziejewski - 2015 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 40 (1):63-90.
    Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a representational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose a solution to this latter problem. (...)
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  • Can Interventions Rescue Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Causality?Lorenzo Casini - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (4):1155-1183.
    Glennan appeals to interventions to solve the ontological and explanatory regresses that threaten his mechanistic account of causality . I argue that Glennan’s manoeuvre fails. The appeal to interventions is not able to address the ontological regress, and it blocks the explanatory regress only at the cost of making the account inapplicable to non-modular mechanisms. I offer a solution to the explanatory regress that makes use of dynamic Bayesian networks. My argument is illustrated by a case study from systems biology, (...)
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  • Expectations-based Processes – An Interventionist Account of Economic Practice: Putting the Direct Practice of Economics on the Agenda of Philosophy of Economics.Leonardo Ivarola, Gustavo Marques & Diego Weisman - 2013 - Economic Thought 2 (2):20.
    The paper starts by distinguishing between two kinds of economic practice: theoretical economic practice (TEP) (model and theory building) and direct economic practice (DEP) (the practical operation upon real economies). Most of the epistemological and philosophical considerations have been directed to the first type of practice, one of whose main goals is the discovery of particular sorts of economic laws, mechanisms and other regularities which throw light on relevant economic patterns. We do not deny that in some restricted domains these (...)
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  • Against Harmony: Infinite Idealizations and Causal Explanation.Iulian D. Toader - 2015 - In Ilie Parvu, Gabriel Sandu & Iulian D. Toader (eds.), Romanian Studies in Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 313: Springer. pp. 291-301.
    This paper argues against the view that the standard explanation of phase transitions in statistical mechanics may be considered a causal explanation, a distortion that can nevertheless successfully represent causal relations.
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