This is an introduction to the volume "Explanation Beyond Causation: Philosophical Perspectives on Non-Causal Explanations", edited by A. Reutlinger and J. Saatsi (OUP, forthcoming in 2017). -/- Explanations are very important to us in many contexts: in science, mathematics, philosophy, and also in everyday and juridical contexts. But what is an explanation? In the philosophical study of explanation, there is long-standing, influential tradition that links explanation intimately to causation: we often explain by providing accurate information about the causes of the (...) phenomenon to be explained. Such causal accounts have been the received view of the nature of explanation, particularly in philosophy of science, since the 1980s. However, philosophers have recently begun to break with this causal tradition by shifting their focus to kinds of explanation that do not turn on causal information. The increasing recognition of the importance of such non-causal explanations in the sciences and elsewhere raises pressing questions for philosophers of explanation. What is the nature of non-causal explanations - and which theory best captures it? How do non-causal explanations relate to causal ones? How are non-causal explanations in the sciences related to those in mathematics and metaphysics? This volume of new essays explores answers to these and other questions at the heart of contemporary philosophy of explanation. The essays address these questions from a variety of perspectives, including general accounts of non-causal and causal explanations, as well as a wide range of detailed case studies of non-causal explanations from the sciences, mathematics and metaphysics. (shrink)

Philosophy of physics is a small but thriving research field situated at the intersection between the natural sciences and the humanities. However, what exactly distinguishes philosophy of physics from physics is rarely made explicit in much depth. We provide a detailed analysis in the form of eleven theses, delineating both the nature of the questions asked in philosophy of physics and the methodology with which they are addressed.

This essay introduces the transcription and translation of Paul Feyerabend's "Der Begriff der Verständlichkeit in der modernen Physik" [The concept of intelligibility in modern physics] (1948), which is an early essay written by Paul Feyerabend in 1948 on the topic of intelligibility (Verständlichkeit) and visualizability (Anschaulichkeit) of physical theories. The existence of such essay was likely. It is listed in his bibliography as his first publication. Yet the content of the essay was unknown, as no original or copy is extant (...) in Feyerabend's Nachlass and no known published version was available to the community—until now. The essay has both historical and philosophical interest: it is, as far as our current knowledge goes, Feyerabend's earliest extant publication. It documents Feyerabend's philosophical interest as a physicist-to-be, in what he himself called his “positivist” phase; and it gives a rare if fragmentary insight into the early discussions of the ‘Third Vienna Circle’ and, more generally, the philosophical culture of discussion in Vienna. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that what makes our ordinary judgements about token causation true can be explicated in terms of interferences into quasi-inertial processes. These interferences and quasi-inertial processes can in turn be fully explicated in scientific terms. In this sense the account presented here is reductive. I will furthermore argue that this version of a process-theory of causation can deal with the traditional problems that process theories have to face, such as the problem of misconnection and the (...) problem of disconnection as well as with a problem concerning the mis-classification of pre-emption cases. (shrink)

According to a widespread view, which can be traced back to Russell’s famous attack on the notion of cause, causal notions have no legitimate role to play in how mature physical theories represent the world. In this paper I first critically examine a number of arguments for this view that center on the asymmetry of the causal relation and argue that none of them succeed. I then argue that embedding the dynamical models of a theory into richer causal structures can (...) allow us to decide between models in cases where our observational data severely underdetermine our choice of dynamical models. (shrink)

Astroparticle physics is a recent sub-discipline of physics that emerged from early cosmic ray studies, astrophysics, and particle physics. Its theoretical foundations range from quantum field theory to general relativity, but the underlying “standard models” of cosmology and particle physics are far from being unified. The paper explores the pragmatic strategies employed in astroparticle physics in order to unify a disunified research field, the concept of observation involved in these strategies, and their relations to scientific realism.

This article examines Cohen’s “transcendental method”, Windelband’s “critical method”, the neo-Kantian distinctions between natural science and the humanities (i. e., human or cultural sciences), and Weber’s account of ideal-typical explanations. The Marburg and the Southwest Schools of neo-Kantianism have in common that their respective philosophies of science focused on method, but they substantially differ in their approaches. Cohen advanced the “transcendental method”, which was taken up and transformed by Natorp and Cassirer; later, it became influential in neo-Kantian approaches to 20th (...) century physics. Windelband distinguished between facts and values, linking the former to the “genetic” method of history and the latter to the “critical” method of philosophy; and between the “nomothetic” and “idiographic” methods of the empirical sciences, a distinction further elaborated by Rickert. The distinction does not give rise to a sharp discrimination but is rather what Weber would later call an ideal type. All these approaches contribute in different ways to understanding the structure of scientific knowledge, focusing on different aspects of the general path of the empirical sciences between rationalism and empiricism. (shrink)

The article investigates the way in which Peter Mittelstaedt has been contributing to the philosophy of physics for half a century. It is shown that he pursues a path between rationalism and empiricism in the sense of Erhard Scheibe’s philosophy of the physicists. Starting from Kant’s a priori he gives a rational reconstruction of the conceptual revolutions of 20th century physics. The central topic of his philosophy of physics is the quest for semantic self-consistency, which for quantum mechanics is a (...) hard nut to crack. (shrink)

The paper takes up Bell's “Everett theory” and develops it further. The resulting theory is about the system of all particles in the universe, each located in ordinary, 3-dimensional space. This many-particle system as a whole performs random jumps through 3N-dimensional configuration space – hence “Tychistic Bohmian Mechanics”. The distribution of its spontaneous localisations in configuration space is given by the Born Rule probability measure for the universal wavefunction. Contra Bell, the theory is argued to satisfy the minimal desiderata for (...) a Bohmian theory within the Primitive Ontology framework. TBM's formalism is that of ordinary Bohmian Mechanics, without the postulate of continuous particle trajectories and their deterministic dynamics. This “rump formalism” receives, however, a different interpretation. We defend TBM as an empirically adequate and coherent quantum theory. Objections voiced by Bell and Maudlin are rebutted. The “for all practical purposes”-classical, Everettian worlds exist sequentially in TBM. In a temporally coarse-grained sense, they quasi-persist. By contrast, the individual particles themselves cease to persist. (shrink)

The line of argument pursued in this paper is to proceed from Einstein’s fundamental problem situation to a consideration of scientific representation with respect to the Special theory of relativity (STR). Einstein’s fundamental problem situation, which is Kantian in spirit, is how the conceptual freedom of the scientist is compatible with the need for an objective representation of an independently given material world. To solve this philosophical issue Einstein employs a number of constraints, which are central to the STR. The (...) issue of scientific representation leads to a consideration of the notion of reality and to the realistic commitments implied in the STR. From this point of view, the paper concludes that Einstein was committed to a kind of ‘structural’ realism. (shrink)