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Calling for Explanation

New York, NY: Oxford University Press (2022)

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  1. How General Do Theories of Explanation Need To Be?Bernhard Nickel - 2010 - Noûs 44 (2):305-328.
    Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phenomenon to give an account of. On these views, it is impossible to give any theories of explanation at all. I argue (...)
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  • Studies in the logic of confirmation (I.).Carl Gustav Hempel - 1945 - Mind 54 (213):1-26.
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  • Studies in the logic of confirmation (II.).Carl Gustav Hempel - 1945 - Mind 54 (214):97-121.
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  • Universes.John Leslie - 1989 - New York: Routledge.
    First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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  • Universes.John Leslie - 1989 - London: Routledge.
    First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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  • A normative account of the need for explanation.Zanja Yudell & Wai-Hung Wong - 2015 - Synthese 192 (9):2863-2885.
    Although explanation is a central topic in the philosophy of science, there is an important issue concerning explanation that has not been discussed much, namely, why some phenomena need an explanation while some do not. In this paper we first explain why this is an important issue, and then discuss two accounts of the need for explanation that can be gathered from the literature. We argue that both accounts are inadequate. The main purpose of the paper is, however, to offer (...)
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  • Fine-tuning and multiple universes.Roger White - 2000 - Noûs 34 (2):260–276.
    ports the thesis that there exist very many universes. The view has found favor with a number of philosophers such as Derek Parfit ~1998!, J. J. C. Smart ~1989! and Peter van Inwagen ~1993!.1 My purpose is to argue that this is a mistake. First let me set out the issue in more detail.
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  • Metaphysics.Peter Van Inwagen - 1993 - Cambridge, MA: Routledge.
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  • Brute necessity.James Van Cleve - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (9):e12516.
    In a growing number of papers, one encounters arguments to the effect that certain philosophical views are objectionable because they would imply that there are necessary truths for whose necessity there is no explanation. That is, they imply that there are propositions p such that (a) it is necessary that p, but (b) there is no explanation why it is necessary that p. For short, they imply that there are “brute necessities.” Therefore, the arguments conclude, the views in question should (...)
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  • Fine-tuning, multiple universes, and the "this universe" objection.Neil A. Manson & Michael J. Thrush - 2003 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (1):67–83.
    When it is suggested that the fine‐tuning of the universe for life provides evidence for a cosmic designer, the multiple‐universe hypothesis is often presented as an alternative. Some philosophers object that the multiple‐universe hypothesis fails to explain why this universe is fine‐tuned for life. We suggest the “This Universe” objection is no better than the “This Planet” objection. We also fault proponents of the “This Universe” objection for presupposing that we could not have existed in any other universe and that (...)
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  • Reply to Copp: Naturalism, normativity, and the varieties of realism worth worrying about.Sharon Street - 2008 - Philosophical Issues 18 (1):207-228.
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  • Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Rethink It.Sharon Street - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 11.
    This chapter accepts for the sake of argument Ronald Dworkin’s point that the only viable form of normative skepticism is internal, and develops an internal skeptical argument directed specifically at normative realism. There is a striking and puzzling coincidence between normative judgments that are true, and normative judgments that causal forces led us to believe—a practical/theoretical puzzle to which the constructivist view has a solution. Normative realists have no solution, but are driven to conclude that we are probably hopeless at (...)
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  • A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.Sharon Street - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 127 (1):109-166.
    Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the (...)
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  • Mathematical explanation.Mark Steiner - 1978 - Philosophical Studies 34 (2):135 - 151.
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  • Ambiguity and explanation.Jonathan L. Shaheen - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (8):839-866.
    This paper presents evidence that ‘because’ is importantly ambiguous between two closely related senses covering what are usually called causal explanations, on the one hand, and grounding or metaphysical explanations, on the other hand. To this end, it introduces the lexical categories of monosemy, polysemy and homonymy; describes a test for polysemy; and discusses the results of the test when applied to ‘because’. It also shows how to understand so-called hybrid explanations in light of the semantic facts established by the (...)
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  • Primary philosophy.Michael Scriven - 1966 - New York,: McGraw-Hill.
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  • The Reliability Challenge and the Epistemology of Logic.Joshua Schechter - 2010 - Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1):437-464.
    We think of logic as objective. We also think that we are reliable about logic. These views jointly generate a puzzle: How is it that we are reliable about logic? How is it that our logical beliefs match an objective domain of logical fact? This is an instance of a more general challenge to explain our reliability about a priori domains. In this paper, I argue that the nature of this challenge has not been properly understood. I explicate the challenge (...)
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  • Is there a reliability challenge for logic?Joshua Schechter - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):325-347.
    There are many domains about which we think we are reliable. When there is prima facie reason to believe that there is no satisfying explanation of our reliability about a domain given our background views about the world, this generates a challenge to our reliability about the domain or to our background views. This is what is often called the reliability challenge for the domain. In previous work, I discussed the reliability challenges for logic and for deductive inference. I argued (...)
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  • Could Evolution Explain Our Reliability about Logic.Joshua Schechter - 2005 - In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Oxford University Press. pp. 214.
    We are reliable about logic in the sense that we by-and-large believe logical truths and disbelieve logical falsehoods. Given that logic is an objective subject matter, it is difficult to provide a satisfying explanation of our reliability. This generates a significant epistemological challenge, analogous to the well-known Benacerraf-Field problem for mathematical Platonism. One initially plausible way to answer the challenge is to appeal to evolution by natural selection. The central idea is that being able to correctly deductively reason conferred a (...)
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  • Time’s arrow and Archimedes’ point.Huw Price - 1996 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 59 (4):1093-1096.
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  • Boltzmann’s Time Bomb.Huw Price - 2002 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (1):83-119.
    Since the late nineteenth century, physics has been puzzled by the time-asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomena in the light of the apparent T-symmetry of the underlying laws of mechanics. However, a compelling solution to this puzzle has proved elusive. In part, I argue, this can be attributed to a failure to distinguish two conceptions of the problem. According to one, the main focus of our attention is a time-asymmetric lawlike generalisation. According to the other, it is a particular fact about the (...)
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  • The realm of reason.Christopher Peacocke - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth, content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content. To show how (...)
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  • Explanation and epistemology.William G. Lycan - 2002 - In Paul K. Moser (ed.), The Oxford handbook of epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 413.
    Second, there is a form of ampliative inference that has come to be called ‘inference to the best explanation,’ or more briefly ‘explanatory inference.’ Roughly: From the fact that a certain hypothesis would explain the data at hand better than any other available hypothesis, we infer with some degree of confidence that that leading hypothesis is correct. There is no question but that this inference is often performed. Arguably, every human being performs it many times in a day, perhaps without (...)
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  • Inference to the Best explanation.Peter Lipton - 2004 - In Martin Curd & Stathis Psillos (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science. Routledge. pp. 193.
    Science depends on judgments of the bearing of evidence on theory. Scientists must judge whether an observation or the result of an experiment supports, disconfirms, or is simply irrelevant to a given hypothesis. Similarly, scientists may judge that, given all the available evidence, a hypothesis ought to be accepted as correct or nearly so, rejected as false, or neither. Occasionally, these evidential judgments can be made on deductive grounds. If an experimental result strictly contradicts a hypothesis, then the truth of (...)
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  • Putting explanation back into “inference to the best explanation”.Marc Lange - 2022 - Noûs 56 (1):84-109.
    Many philosophers argue that explanatoriness plays no special role in confirmation – that “inference to the best explanation” (IBE) incorrectly demands giving hypotheses extra credit for their potential explanatory qualities beyond the credit they already deserve for their predictive successes. This paper argues against one common strategy for responding to this thought – that is, for trying to fit IBE within a Bayesian framework. That strategy argues that a hypothesis’ explanatory quality (its “loveliness”) contributes either to its prior probability or (...)
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  • The Relationship Between Belief and Credence.Elizabeth G. Jackson - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):1–13.
    Sometimes epistemologists theorize about belief, a tripartite attitude on which one can believe, withhold belief, or disbelieve a proposition. In other cases, epistemologists theorize about credence, a fine-grained attitude that represents one’s subjective probability or confidence level toward a proposition. How do these two attitudes relate to each other? This article explores the relationship between belief and credence in two categories: descriptive and normative. It then explains the broader significance of the belief-credence connection and concludes with general lessons from the (...)
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  • Screams for explanation: finetuning and naturalness in the foundations of physics.Sabine Hossenfelder - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 16):3727-3745.
    We critically analyze the rationale of arguments from finetuning and naturalness in particle physics and cosmology, notably the small values of the mass of the Higgs-boson and the cosmological constant. We identify several new reasons why these arguments are not scientifically relevant. Besides laying out why the necessity to define a probability distribution renders arguments from naturalness internally contradictory, it is also explained why it is conceptually questionable to single out assumptions about dimensionless parameters from among a host of other (...)
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  • Time-Slice Rationality.Brian Hedden - 2015 - Mind 124 (494):449-491.
    I advocate Time-Slice Rationality, the thesis that the relationship between two time-slices of the same person is not importantly different, for purposes of rational evaluation, from the relationship between time-slices of distinct persons. The locus of rationality, so to speak, is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. This claim is motivated by consideration of puzzle cases for personal identity over time and by a very moderate form of internalism about rationality. Time-Slice Rationality conflicts with two proposed principles of (...)
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  • The inference to the best explanation.Gilbert H. Harman - 1965 - Philosophical Review 74 (1):88-95.
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  • A surprise for Horwich (and some advocates of the fine-tuning argument (which does not include Horwich (as far as I know))).David Harker - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 161 (2):247-261.
    The judgment that a given event is epistemically improbable is necessary but insufficient for us to conclude that the event is surprising. Paul Horwich has argued that surprising events are, in addition, more probable given alternative background assumptions that are not themselves extremely improbable. I argue that Horwich’s definition fails to capture important features of surprises and offer an alternative definition that accords better with intuition. An important application of Horwich’s analysis has arisen in discussions of fine-tuning arguments. In the (...)
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  • Explanatory inquiry and the need for explanation.Stephen R. Grimm - 2008 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (3):481-497.
    Explanatory inquiry characteristically begins with a certain puzzlement about the world. But why do certain situations elicit our puzzlement while others leave us, in some epistemically relevant sense, cold? Moreover, what exactly is involved in the move from a state of puzzlement to a state where one's puzzlement is satisfied? In this paper I try to answer both of these questions. I also suggest ways in which our account of scientific rationality might benefit from having a better sense of the (...)
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  • Explanation and scientific understanding.Michael Friedman - 1974 - Journal of Philosophy 71 (1):5-19.
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  • XV*—The A Prioricity of Logic.Hartry Field - 1996 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1):359-380.
    Hartry Field; XV*—The A Prioricity of Logic, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 359–380, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.
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  • Realism, Mathematics, and Modality.Hartry Field - 1988 - Philosophical Topics 16 (1):57-107.
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  • The epistemological challenge to metanormative realism: how best to understand it, and how to cope with it.David Enoch - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 148 (3):413-438.
    Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative— realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. (...)
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  • The heuristic conception of inference to the best explanation.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 175 (7):1745-1766.
    An influential suggestion about the relationship between Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation holds that IBE functions as a heuristic to approximate Bayesian reasoning. While this view promises to unify Bayesianism and IBE in a very attractive manner, important elements of the view have not yet been spelled out in detail. I present and argue for a heuristic conception of IBE on which IBE serves primarily to locate the most probable available explanatory hypothesis to serve as a working hypothesis (...)
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  • The Moralistic Fallacy: On the 'Appropriateness' of Emotions.Justin D'Arms & Daniel Jacobson - 2000 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 61 (1):65-90.
    Philosophers often call emotions appropriate or inappropriate. What is meant by such talk? In one sense, explicated in this paper, to call an emotion appropriate is to say that the emotion is fitting: it accurately presents its object as having certain evaluative features. For instance, envy might be thought appropriate when one's rival has something good which one lacks. But someone might grant that a circumstance has these features, yet deny that envy is appropriate, on the grounds that it is (...)
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  • Ethics without principles.Jonathan Dancy - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    In this much-anticipated book, Jonathan Dancy offers the only available full-scale treatment of particularism in ethics, a view with which he has been associated for twenty years. Dancy now presents particularism as the view that the possibility of moral thought and judgement does not in any way depend on an adequate supply of principles. He grounds this claim on a form of reasons-holism, holding that what is a reason in one case need not be any reason in another, and maintaining (...)
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  • Proving Quadratic Reciprocity: Explanation, Disagreement, Transparency and Depth.William D’Alessandro - 2020 - Synthese (9):1-44.
    Gauss’s quadratic reciprocity theorem is among the most important results in the history of number theory. It’s also among the most mysterious: since its discovery in the late 18th century, mathematicians have regarded reciprocity as a deeply surprising fact in need of explanation. Intriguingly, though, there’s little agreement on how the theorem is best explained. Two quite different kinds of proof are most often praised as explanatory: an elementary argument that gives the theorem an intuitive geometric interpretation, due to Gauss (...)
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  • Explanation in mathematics: Proofs and practice.William D'Alessandro - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (11):e12629.
    Mathematicians distinguish between proofs that explain their results and those that merely prove. This paper explores the nature of explanatory proofs, their role in mathematical practice, and some of the reasons why philosophers should care about them. Among the questions addressed are the following: what kinds of proofs are generally explanatory (or not)? What makes a proof explanatory? Do all mathematical explanations involve proof in an essential way? Are there really such things as explanatory proofs, and if so, how do (...)
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  • Theory of knowledge.Roderick M. Chisholm - 1966 - Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
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  • Measures, explanations and the past: Should ‘special’ initial conditions be explained?Craig Callender - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2):195-217.
    For the generalizations of thermodynamics to obtain, it appears that a very ‘special’ initial condition of the universe is required. Is this initial condition itself in need of explanation? I argue that it is not. In so doing, I offer a framework in which to think about ‘special’ initial conditions in all areas of science, though I concentrate on the case of thermodynamics. I urge the view that it is not always a serious mark against a theory that it must (...)
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  • On Unexplained (Modal) Patterns.Harjit Bhogal - 2022 - Erkenntnis:1-18.
    Some patterns call out for explanation, in the sense that we have a pro tanto reason to reject theories that do not give them an appropriate explanation. I argue that certain modal patterns call out for explanation in this way—and this provides a reason to reject certain theories of modality that fail to explain such patterns. However, I also consider a response to this argument, which claims that the modal patterns do not need explanation. This response might be viable but (...)
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  • Coincidences and the Grain of Explanation.Harjit Bhogal - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (3):677-694.
    I give an account of what makes an event a coincidence. -/- I start by critically discussing a couple of other approaches to the notion of coincidence -- particularly that of Lando (2017) -- before developing my own view. The central idea of my view is that the correct understanding of coincidences is closely related to our understanding of the correct 'level' or 'grain' of explanation. Coincidences have a kind of explanatory deficiency — if they did not have this deficiency (...)
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  • Induction and the Glue of the World.Harjit Bhogal - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2):319-333.
    Views which deny that there are necessary connections between distinct existences have often been criticized for leading to inductive skepticism. If there is no glue holding the world together then there seems to be no basis on which to infer from past to future. However, deniers of necessary connections have typically been unconcerned. After all, they say, everyone has a problem with induction. But, if we look at the connection between induction and explanation, we can develop the problem of induction (...)
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  • Coincidence Avoidance and Formulating the Access Problem.Sharon E. Berry - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (6):687 - 701.
    In this article, I discuss a trivialization worry for Hartry Field’s official formulation of the access problem for mathematical realists, which was pointed out by Øystein Linnebo (and has recently been made much of by Justin Clarke-Doane). I argue that various attempted reformulations of the Benacerraf problem fail to block trivialization, but that access worriers can better defend themselves by sticking closer to Hartry Field’s initial informal characterization of the access problem in terms of (something like) general epistemic norms of (...)
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  • A Combinatorial Argument against Practical Reasons for Belief.Selim Berker - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (4):427-470.
    Are there practical reasons for and against belief? For example, do the practical benefits to oneself or others of holding a certain belief count in favor of that belief? I argue "No." My argument involves considering how practical reasons for belief, if there were such things, would combine with other reasons for belief in order to determine all-things-considered verdicts, especially in cases involving equally balanced reasons of either a practical or an epistemic sort.
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  • Mathematical truth.Paul Benacerraf - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (19):661-679.
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  • What Makes Something Surprising?Dan Baras & Oded Na’Aman - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1):195-215.
    Surprises are important in our everyday lives as well as in our scientific and philosophical theorizing—in psychology, information theory, cognitive-neuroscience, philosophy of science, and confirmation theory. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory theory of what makes something surprising. It has long been acknowledged that not everything unexpected is surprising. The reader had no reason to expect that there will be exactly 190 words in this abstract and yet there is nothing surprising about this fact. We offer a novel theory that explains (...)
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  • Why Do Certain States of Affairs Call Out for Explanation? A Critique of Two Horwichian Accounts.Dan Baras - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (5):1405-1419.
    Motivated by examples, many philosophers believe that there is a significant distinction between states of affairs that are striking and therefore call for explanation and states of affairs that are not striking. This idea underlies several influential debates in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, normative theory, philosophy of modality, and philosophy of science but is not fully elaborated or explored. This paper aims to address this lack of clear explanation first by clarifying the epistemological issue at hand. Then it introduces an (...)
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