To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question “why?” rather than only the question “what?”, is one of the foremost objectives of all rational inquiry; and especially, scientific research in its various branches strives to go beyond a mere description of its subject matter by providing an explanation of the phenomena it investigates. While there is rather general agreement about this chief objective of science, there exists considerable difference of opinion as to the function (...) and the essential characteristics of scientific explanation. In the present essay, an attempt will be made to shed some light on these issues by means of an elementary survey of the basic pattern of scientific explanation and a subsequent more rigorous analysis of the concept of law and of the logical structure of explanatory arguments. (shrink)

Explaining Attitudes develops a new account of propositional attitudes - practical realism.

Ansgar Beckermann Once, a mind-body theory based upon the idea of supervenience seemed to be a promising alternative to the various kinds of reductionistic physicalism. In recent years, however, Jaegwon Kim has subjected his own brainchild to a very thorough criticism. With most of Kim’s arguments I agree wholeheartedly - not least because they converge with my own thoughts.² In order to explain the few points of divergence with Kim’s views, I shall have to prepare the ground a little. In (...) the course of this paper I will therefore do two things: At the start, I will try to sketch the logical topography of the „solution space“ of the problem Kim is concerned with. As a second step, I shall then comment on the concepts of identity, realization and reduction and attempt to show that Kim’s concept of realization is too narrow, because he is still very much in the grip of the traditional view with regard to what it means to show that a property _F _is identical with, or realized by, another property _G_. (shrink)

In der Philosophie ist man sich heute weitgehend einig, daß das, was man gemeinhin unter dem Stichwort ‘Bewußtsein’ zusammenfaßt, eine Reihe sehr unterschiedlicher Aspekte beinhaltet. Bewußtsein hat zunächst einmal etwas mit Selbstwissen zu tun, d.h. mit der Fähigkeit mancher Wesen, nicht nur ihre Um- welt, sondern auch sich selbst, ihre eigenen Zustände und Handlungen zu reprä- sentieren. Die hier einschlägigen Stichworte heißen deshalb ‘Metarepräsenta- tion’2 und ‘Selbstmodell’. Dabei ist das zweite Stichwort letztlich treffender, da die Repräsentationen der Umwelt und der (...) eigenen Zustände und Handlungen nicht unverbunden nebeneinander stehen, sondern so miteinander verknüpft sein sollten, daß eine Repräsentation des Wesens selbst in seiner Umwelt ent- steht. Nur auf diese Weise kann der Zweck dieser Art von Repräsentationen erreicht werden: die Überwachung und Steuerung der eigenen Handlungen (‘self-monitoring’). (shrink)