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Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation

New York: Oxford University Press (2003)

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  1. Explanation in Evo-Devo.Marie I. Kaiser - 2021 - In de la Rosa L. N. & Müller G. B. (eds.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology - A Reference Guide. Springer.
    Evo-devo is a multidisciplinary field that investigates the interplay between evolutionary and developmental processes and brings together different kinds of explanatory strategies. This chapter examines the structure of paradigmatic explanations in evo-devo (e.g., the explanation of the origin of an evolutionary novelty) and raises philosophical questions about explanation in evo-devo. Much research in evo-devo is concerned with studying the developmental mechanisms that constrain and facilitate phenotypic evolution, which suggests that a distinctive feature of evo-devo is that it constructs mechanistic explanations. (...)
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  • Explanation and Understanding Revisited.Panu Raatikainen - 2017 - In Niiniluoto Ilkka & Wallgren Thomas (eds.), On the Human Condition: Philosophical Essays in Honour of the Centennial Anniversary of Georg Henrik von Wright. Acta Philosophica Fennica vol 93. The Philosophical Society of Finland. pp. 339-353.
    "Explanation and Understanding" (1971) by Georg Henrik von Wright is a modern classic in analytic hermeneutics, and in the philosophy of the social sciences and humanities in general. In this work, von Wright argues against naturalism, or methodological monism, i.e. the idea that both the natural sciences and the social sciences follow broadly the same general scientific approach and aim to achieve causal explanations. Against this view, von Wright contends that the social sciences are qualitatively different from the natural sciences: (...)
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  • II—James Woodward: Mechanistic Explanation: Its Scope and Limits.James Woodward - 2013 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1):39-65.
    This paper explores the question of whether all or most explanations in biology are, or ideally should be, ‘mechanistic’. I begin by providing an account of mechanistic explanation, making use of the interventionist ideas about causation I have developed elsewhere. This account emphasizes the way in which mechanistic explanations, at least in the biological sciences, integrate difference‐making and spatio‐temporal information, and exhibit what I call fine‐tunedness of organization. I also emphasize the role played by modularity conditions in mechanistic explanation. I (...)
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  • L'explication en biologie.Marie I. Kaiser - 2014 - In Eric Bapteste, Thierry Hoquet, Anouk Barberousse, Francesca Merlin, Frédéric Bouchard & Vincent Devictor (eds.), Précis de Philosophie de la biologie [Handbook Philosophy of Biology]. Vuibert Press. pp. 143-155.
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  • Normality and actual causal strength.Thomas F. Icard, Jonathan F. Kominsky & Joshua Knobe - 2017 - Cognition 161 (C):80-93.
    Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...)
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  • heritability and causal reasoning.Kate E. Lynch - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (1):25-49.
    Gene–environment covariance is the phenomenon whereby genetic differences bias variation in developmental environment, and is particularly problematic for assigning genetic and environmental causation in a heritability analysis. The interpretation of these cases has differed amongst biologists and philosophers, leading some to reject the utility of heritability estimates altogether. This paper examines the factors that influence causal reasoning when G–E covariance is present, leading to interpretive disagreement between scholars. It argues that the causal intuitions elicited are influenced by concepts of agency (...)
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  • Philosophy of the Physical Sciences.Chris Smeenk & Hoefer Carl - 2014 - In Paul Humphreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    The authors survey some debates about the nature and structure of physical theories and about the connections between our physical theories and naturalized metaphysics. The discussion is organized around an “ideal view” of physical theories and criticisms that can be raised against it. This view includes controversial commitments regarding the best analysis of physical modalities and intertheory relations. The authors consider the case in favor of taking laws as the primary modal notion, discussing objections related to alleged violations of the (...)
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  • Causal Comparability, Causal Generalizations, and Epistemic Homogeneity.Rosa W. Runhardt - 2017 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (3):183-208.
    The issue of causal comparability in the social sciences underlies matters of both generalization and extrapolation. After critiquing two existing interpretations of comparability, due to Hitchcock and Hausman, I propose a distinction between ontological and epistemic comparability. While the former refers to whether two cases are actually comparable, the latter respects that in cases of incomplete information, we need to rely on whatever evidence we have of comparability. I argue, using a political science case study, that in those cases of (...)
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  • Signals that make a Difference.Brett Calcott, Paul E. Griffiths & Arnaud Pocheville - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science:axx022.
    Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks — from the way monkeys in a troop communicate, to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this paper, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his (...)
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  • Grounding and the argument from explanatoriness.David Mark Kovacs - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (12):2927-2952.
    In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reactionary” view, according to which (...)
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  • What is Understanding? An Overview of Recent Debates in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.Christoph Baumberger, Claus Beisbart & Georg Brun - 2017 - In Stephen Grimm Christoph Baumberger & Sabine Ammon (eds.), Explaining Understanding: New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Routledge. pp. 1-34.
    The paper provides a systematic overview of recent debates in epistemology and philosophy of science on the nature of understanding. We explain why philosophers have turned their attention to understanding and discuss conditions for “explanatory” understanding of why something is the case and for “objectual” understanding of a whole subject matter. The most debated conditions for these types of understanding roughly resemble the three traditional conditions for knowledge: truth, justification and belief. We discuss prominent views about how to construe these (...)
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  • Evo-devo: a science of dispositions.Christopher J. Austin - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (2):373-389.
    Evolutionary developmental biology represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the ontogenesis and evolutionary progression of the denizens of the natural world. Given the empirical successes of the evo-devo framework, and its now widespread acceptance, a timely and important task for the philosophy of biology is to critically discern the ontological commitments of that framework and assess whether and to what extent our current metaphysical models are able to accommodate them. In this paper, I argue that one particular model (...)
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  • Reconciling New Mechanism and Psychological Explanation: A Pragmatic Approach.Michael De Vivo - unknown
    Recently, Gualtiero Piccinini and Carl Craver have argued that functional analyses in psychology lack explanatory autonomy from explanations in neuroscience. In this thesis I argue against this claim by motivating and defending a pragmatic-epistemic conception of autonomous psychological explanation. I argue that this conception of autonomy need not require that functional analyses be distinct in kind from neural-mechanistic explanations. I use the framework of Bas van Fraassen’s Pragmatic Theory of Explanation to show that explanations in psychology and neuroscience can be (...)
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  • Reconstituting Phenomena.Maria Kronfeldner - 2015 - In Mäki U., Votsis S., Ruphy S. & Schurz G. (eds.), Recent developments in the philosophy of science. Springer. pp. 169-182.
    In the face of causal complexity, scientists reconstitute phenomena in order to arrive at a more simplified and partial picture that ignores most of the 'bigger picture.' This paper will distinguish between two modes of reconstituting phenomena: one moving down to a level of greater decomposition (toward organizational parts of the original phenomenon), and one moving up to a level of greater abstraction (toward different differences regarding the phenomenon). The first aim of the paper is to illustrate that phenomena are (...)
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  • The topological realization.Daniel Kostić - 2018 - Synthese (1).
    In this paper, I argue that the newly developed network approach in neuroscience and biology provides a basis for formulating a unique type of realization, which I call topological realization. Some of its features and its relation to one of the dominant paradigms of realization and explanation in sciences, i.e. the mechanistic one, are already being discussed in the literature. But the detailed features of topological realization, its explanatory power and its relation to another prominent view of realization, namely the (...)
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  • What do predictive coders want?Colin Klein - 2018 - Synthese 195 (6):2541-2557.
    The so-called “dark room problem” makes vivd the challenges that purely predictive models face in accounting for motivation. I argue that the problem is a serious one. Proposals for solving the dark room problem via predictive coding architectures are either empirically inadequate or computationally intractable. The Free Energy principle might avoid the problem, but only at the cost of setting itself up as a highly idealized model, which is then literally false to the world. I draw at least one optimistic (...)
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  • Impossible Worlds and Metaphysical Explanation: Comments on Kment’s Modality and Explanatory Reasoning.Nina Emery & Christopher S. Hill - 2017 - Analysis 77 (1):134-148.
    In this critical notice of Kment's _Modality and Explanatory Reasoning_, we focus on Kment’s arguments for impossible worlds and on a key part of his discussion of the interactions between modality and explanation – the analogy that he draws between scientific and metaphysical explanation.
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  • (2 other versions)From Silico to Vitro: Computational Models of Complex Biological Systems Reveal Real-World Emergent Phenomena.Orly Stettiner - 2016 - In Vincent C. Müller (ed.), Computing and philosophy: Selected papers from IACAP 2014. Cham: Springer. pp. 133-147.
    Computer simulations constitute a significant scientific tool for promoting scientific understanding of natural phenomena and dynamic processes. Substantial leaps in computational force and software engineering methodologies now allow the design and development of large-scale biological models, which – when combined with advanced graphics tools – may produce realistic biological scenarios, that reveal new scientific explanations and knowledge about real life phenomena. A state-of-the-art simulation system termed Reactive Animation (RA) will serve as a study case to examine the contemporary philosophical debate (...)
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  • Diagnosis and Causal Explanation in Psychiatry.Hane Htut Maung - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 60 (C):15-24.
    In clinical medicine, a diagnosis can offer an explanation of a patient's symptoms by specifying the pathology that is causing them. Diagnoses in psychiatry are also sometimes presented in clinical texts as if they pick out pathological processes that cause sets of symptoms. However, current evidence suggests the possibility that many diagnostic categories in psychiatry are highly causally heterogeneous. For example, major depressive disorder may not be associated with a single type of underlying pathological process, but with a range of (...)
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  • Time Scales and Levels of Organization.James DiFrisco - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (4):795-818.
    The concept of levels of organization, despite its widespread scientific currency, has recently been criticized by a number of philosophers of science. This paper diagnoses the main source of problems facing theories of levels. On this basis, the problems with the usual criteria for distinguishing levels are evaluated: compositional relations, organizational types, and spatial scales. Drawing on some work on hierarchies in ecology, I argue in favor of an alternative conception of levels defined by the criterion of rates or time (...)
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  • (1 other version)A pragmatist view of the metaphysics of entanglement.Richard Healey - 2016 - Synthese:1-38.
    Quantum entanglement is widely believed to be a feature of physical reality with undoubted metaphysical implications. But Schrödinger introduced entanglement as a theoretical relation between representatives of the quantum states of two systems. Entanglement represents a physical relation only if quantum states are elements of physical reality. So arguments for metaphysical holism or nonseparability from entanglement rest on a questionable view of quantum theory. Assignment of entangled quantum states predicts experimentally confirmed violation of Bell inequalities. Can one use these experimental (...)
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  • Robustness in evolutionary explanations: a positive account.Cédric Paternotte & Jonathan Grose - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (1):73-96.
    Robustness analysis is widespread in science, but philosophers have struggled to justify its confirmatory power. We provide a positive account of robustness by analysing some explicit and implicit uses of within and across-model robustness in evolutionary theory. We argue that appeals to robustness are usually difficult to justify because they aim to increase the likeliness that a phenomenon obtains. However, we show that robust results are necessary for explanations of phenomena with specific properties. Across-model robustness is necessary for how-possibly explanations (...)
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  • Modal science.Timothy Williamson - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (4-5):453-492.
    This paper explains and defends the idea that metaphysical necessity is the strongest kind of objective necessity. Plausible closure conditions on the family of objective modalities are shown to entail that the logic of metaphysical necessity is S5. Evidence is provided that some objective modalities are studied in the natural sciences. In particular, the modal assumptions implicit in physical applications of dynamical systems theory are made explicit by using such systems to define models of a modal temporal logic. Those assumptions (...)
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  • Semiotic Tools For Multilevel Cell Communication.Franco Giorgi & Gennaro Auletta - 2016 - Biosemiotics 9 (3):365-382.
    Cell communication plays a key role in multicellular organisms. In developing embryos as in adult organisms, cells communicate by coordinating their differentiation through the establishment and/or renewal of a variety of cell communication channels. Under both these conditions, cells interact by either receptor signalling, surface recognition of specific cell adhesion molecules or transfer of cytoplasmic components through junctional coupling. In recent years, it has become apparent that cells may also communicate through the extracellular release of microvesicles. They may originate as (...)
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  • The Causal Explanatory Functions of Medical Diagnoses.Hane Htut Maung - 2017 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (1):41-59.
    Diagnoses in medicine are often taken to serve as explanations of patients’ symptoms and signs. This article examines how they do so. I begin by arguing that although some instances of diagnostic explanation can be formulated as covering law arguments, they are explanatory neither in virtue of their argumentative structures nor in virtue of general regularities between diagnoses and clinical presentations. I then consider the theory that medical diagnoses explain symptoms and signs by identifying their actual causes in particular cases. (...)
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  • Causal exclusion and the limits of proportionality.Neil McDonnell - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (6):1459-1474.
    Causal exclusion arguments are taken to threaten the autonomy of the special sciences, and the causal efficacy of mental properties. A recent line of response to these arguments has appealed to “independently plausible” and “well grounded” theories of causation to rebut key premises. In this paper I consider two papers which proceed in this vein and show that they share a common feature: they both require causes to be proportional to their effects. I argue that this feature is a bug, (...)
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  • What Would Hume Say? Regularities, Laws, and Mechanisms.Holly Andersen - 2017 - In Phyllis Ilari & Stuart Glennan (eds.), What Would Hume Say? Regularities, Laws, and Mechanisms. pp. 157-168.
    This chapter examines the relationship between laws and mechanisms as approaches to characterising generalizations and explanations in science. I give an overview of recent historical discussions where laws failed to satisfy stringent logical criteria, opening the way for mechanisms to be investigated as a way to explain regularities in nature. This followed by a critical discussion of contemporary debates about the role of laws versus mechanisms in describing versus explaining regularities. I conclude by offering new arguments for two roles for (...)
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  • Your Brain as the Source of Free Will Worth Wanting: Understanding Free Will in the Age of Neuroscience.Eddy Nahmias - 2018 - In Gregg D. Caruso & Owen J. Flanagan (eds.), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophical debates about free will have focused on determinism—a potential ‘threat from behind’ because determinism entails that there are conditions in the distant past that, in accord with the laws of nature, are sufficient for all of our decisions. Neuroscience is consistent with indeterminism, so it is better understood as posing a ‘threat from below’: If our decision-making processes are carried out by neural processes, then it might seem that our decisions are not based on our prior conscious deliberations or (...)
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  • Defeating Manipulation Arguments: Interventionist causation and compatibilist sourcehood.Oisín Deery & Eddy Nahmias - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (5):1255-1276.
    We use recent interventionist theories of causation to develop a compatibilist account of causal sourcehood, which provides a response to Manipulation Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Our account explains the difference between manipulation and determinism, against the claim of Manipulation Arguments that there is no relevant difference. Interventionism allows us to see that causal determinism does not mean that variables outside of the agent causally explain her actions better than variables within the agent, whereas the causal (...)
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  • The manipulation of chemical reactions: probing the limits of interventionism.Georgie Statham - 2017 - Synthese 194 (12):4815-4838.
    I apply James Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation to organic chemistry, modelling three different ways that chemists are able to manipulate the reaction conditions in order to control the outcome of a reaction. These consist in manipulations to the reaction kinetics, thermodynamics, and whether the kinetics or thermodynamics predominates. It is possible to construct interventionist causal models of all of these kinds of manipulation, and therefore to account for them using Woodward’s theory. However, I show that there is an alternate, (...)
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  • Probabilistic Actual Causation.Fenton-Glynn Luke - manuscript
    Actual causes - e.g. Suzy's being exposed to asbestos - often bring about their effects - e.g. Suzy's suffering mesothelioma - probabilistically. I use probabilistic causal models to tackle one of the thornier difficulties for traditional accounts of probabilistic actual causation: namely probabilistic preemption.
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  • What is Shannon information?Olimpia Lombardi, Federico Holik & Leonardo Vanni - 2016 - Synthese 193 (7):1983-2012.
    Despite of its formal precision and its great many applications, Shannon’s theory still offers an active terrain of debate when the interpretation of its main concepts is the task at issue. In this article we try to analyze certain points that still remain obscure or matter of discussion, and whose elucidation contribute to the assessment of the different interpretative proposals about the concept of information. In particular, we argue for a pluralist position, according to which the different views about information (...)
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  • Knowledge, Understanding and Epistemic Value.Duncan Pritchard - 2009 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 64:19-43.
    It is argued that a popular way of accounting for the distinctive value of knowledge by appeal to the distinctive value of cognitive achievements fails because it is a mistake to identify knowledge with cognitive achievements. Nevertheless, it is claimed that understanding, properly conceived, is a type of cognitive achievement, and thus that the distinctive value of cognitive achievements can explain why understanding is of special value.
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  • Are There Genuine Physical Explanations of Mathematical Phenomena?Bradford Skow - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (1):69-93.
    There are lots of arguments for, or justifications of, mathematical theorems that make use of principles from physics. Do any of these constitute explanations? On the one hand, physical principles do not seem like they should be explanatorily relevant; on the other, some particular examples of physical justifications do look explanatory. In this article, I defend the idea that physical justifications can and do explain mathematical facts. 1 Physical Arguments for Mathematical Truths2 Preview3 Mathematical Facts4 Purity5 Doubts about Purity: I6 (...)
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  • Contrasting models of posttraumatic stress disorder: Reply to Monroe and Mineka (2008).Dorthe Berntsen, David C. Rubin & Malene Klindt Bohni - 2008 - Psychological Review 115 (4):1099-1106.
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  • Levels and kinds of explanation: lessons from neuropsychiatry.Sam Wilkinson - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
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  • An Abductive Theory of Constitution.Michael Baumgartner & Lorenzo Casini - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (2):214-233.
    The first part of this paper finds Craver’s (2007) mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of idealized experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation for this common-cause coupling is the existence of an additional dependence relation, viz. constitution. Apart from adequately (...)
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  • Explanatory Indispensability Arguments in Metaethics and Philosophy of Mathematics.Debbie Roberts - 2016 - In Uri D. Leibowitz & Neil Sinclair (eds.), Explanation in Ethics and Mathematics: Debunking and Dispensability. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK.
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  • The Plurality of Explanatory Games.C. Mantzavinos - 2015 - In Gianluca Manzo (ed.), Theories and Social Mechanisms. Oxford: The Bardwell Press. pp. 325-335.
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  • The Possibilities of History.Daniel Nolan - 2016 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 10 (3):441-456.
    _ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 3, pp 441 - 456 Several kinds of historical alternatives are distinguished. Different kinds of historical alternatives are valuable to the practice of history for different reasons. Important uses for historical alternatives include representing different sides of historical disputes; distributing chances of different outcomes over alternatives; and offering explanations of why various alternatives did _not_ in fact happen. Consideration of counterfactuals about what would have happened had things been different in particular ways plays particularly useful (...)
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  • Review of Mathias Frisch's Causal Reasoning in Physics. [REVIEW]Matt Farr - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (4).
    Review of 'Causal Reasoning in Physics' by Mathias Frisch for British Journal for Philosophy of Science.
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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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  • Agency as difference-making: causal foundations of moral responsibility.Johannes Himmelreich - 2015 - Dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science
    We are responsible for some things but not for others. In this thesis, I investigate what it takes for an entity to be responsible for something. This question has two components: agents and actions. I argue for a permissive view about agents. Entities such as groups or artificially intelligent systems may be agents in the sense required for responsibility. With respect to actions, I argue for a causal view. The relation in virtue of which agents are responsible for actions is (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.Michael Waldmann (ed.) - 2017 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...)
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  • A Defense of Causal Invariantism.Martin Montminy & Andrew Russo - 2016 - Analytic Philosophy 57 (1):49-75.
    Causal contextualism holds that sentences of the form ‘c causes e’ have context-sensitive truth-conditions. We consider four arguments invoked by Jonathan Schaffer in favor of this view. First, he argues that his brand of contextualism helps solve puzzles about transitivity. Second, he contends that how one describes the relata of the causal relation sometimes affects the truth of one’s claim. Third, Schaffer invokes the phenomenon of contrastive focus to conclude that causal statements implicitly designate salient alternatives to the cause and (...)
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  • Understanding Why.Alison Hills - 2015 - Noûs 49 (2):661-688.
    I argue that understanding why p involves a kind of intellectual know how and differsfrom both knowledge that p and knowledge why p (as they are standardly understood).I argue that understanding, in this sense, is valuable.
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  • Bayesian Confirmation: A Means with No End.Peter Brössel & Franz Huber - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (4):737-749.
    Any theory of confirmation must answer the following question: what is the purpose of its conception of confirmation for scientific inquiry? In this article, we argue that no Bayesian conception of confirmation can be used for its primary intended purpose, which we take to be making a claim about how worthy of belief various hypotheses are. Then we consider a different use to which Bayesian confirmation might be put, namely, determining the epistemic value of experimental outcomes, and thus to decide (...)
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  • How to define levels of explanation and evaluate their indispensability.Christopher Clarke - 2017 - Synthese 194 (6).
    Some explanations in social science, psychology and biology belong to a higher level than other explanations. And higher explanations possess the virtue of abstracting away from the details of lower explanations, many philosophers argue. As a result, these higher explanations are irreplaceable. And this suggests that there are genuine higher laws or patterns involving social, psychological and biological states. I show that this ‘abstractness argument’ is really an argument schema, not a single argument. This is because the argument uses the (...)
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  • Why the Difference Between Explanation and Argument Matters to Science Education.Ingo Brigandt - 2016 - Science & Education 25 (3-4):251-275.
    Contributing to the recent debate on whether or not explanations ought to be differentiated from arguments, this article argues that the distinction matters to science education. I articulate the distinction in terms of explanations and arguments having to meet different standards of adequacy. Standards of explanatory adequacy are important because they correspond to what counts as a good explanation in a science classroom, whereas a focus on evidence-based argumentation can obscure such standards of what makes an explanation explanatory. I provide (...)
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  • Explanatory unification and natural selection explanations.Stefan Petkov, Wei Wang & Yi Lei - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (5):705-725.
    The debate between the dynamical and the statistical interpretations of natural selection is centred on the question of whether all explanations that employ the concepts of natural selection and drift are reducible to causal explanations. The proponents of the statistical interpretation answer negatively, but insist on the fact that selection/drift arguments are explanatory. However, they remain unclear on where the explanatory power comes from. The proponents of the dynamical interpretation answer positively and try to reduce selection/drift arguments to some of (...)
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