Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events, and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this..

In this paper I develop a theory of contrastive why questions that establishes under what conditions it is sensible to ask "why p rather than q?". p and q must be outcomes of a single type of causal process.

Offering a new approach to scientific explanation, this book focuses initially on the explaining act itself.

In this study of events and their places in our language and thought, Bennett propounds and defends views about what kind of item an event is, how the language of events works, and about how these two themes are interrelated. He argues that most of the supposedly metaphysical literature is really about the semantics of their names, and that the true metaphysic of events--known by Leibniz and rediscovered by Kim--has not been universally accepted because it has been tarred with the (...) brush of a false semantic theory. (shrink)

The final work of a distinguished physicist, this remarkable volume examines the emotive significance of time, the time order of mechanics, the time direction of thermodynamics and microstatistics, the time direction of macrostatistics, and the time of quantum physics. Coherent discussions include accounts of analytic methods of scientific philosophy in the investigation of probability, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, and causality. "[Reichenbach’s] best by a good deal."—Physics Today. 1971 ed.

A shift in emphasis can change the truth-value of a singular causal sentence. This poses a challenge to the view that singular sentences predicate a relation. I argue that emphasized causal sentences conjoin predication of a causal relation between events with predication of a relation of causal relevance between states of affairs (or perhaps facts). This is superior to the treatments of such sentences offered by Achinstein, Dretske, Kim, Sanford, Bennett, and Levin. My proposal affords clarity regarding logical structure, at (...) least at a certain level of detail. It makes the relation between the content of an emphasized causal sentence and the unemphasized version clear. It answers some questions about the ontological requirements of the truth of emphasized causal sentences, without introducing new entities (as do some other accounts) or unacceptable consequences for identity and individuation of events. (shrink)

How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses, and making inferences? The model of " inference to the best explanation " -- that we infer the hypothesis that would, if correct, provide the best explanation of the available evidence--offers a compelling account of inferences both in science and in ordinary life. Widely cited by epistemologists and philosophers of science, IBE has nonetheless remained little more than a slogan. Now this influential work has been thoroughly revised and updated, and features (...) a new introduction and two new chapters. Inference to the Best Explanation is an unrivaled exposition of a theory of particular interest in the fields both of epistemology and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

I advance a new theory of causal relevance, according to which causal claims convey information about conditional probability functions. This theory is motivated by the problem of disjunctive factors, which haunts existing probabilistic theories of causation. After some introductory remarks, I present in Section 3 a sketch of Eells's (1991) probabilistic theory of causation, which provides the framework for much of the discussion. Section 4 explains how the problem of disjunctive factors arises within this framework. After rejecting three proposed solutions, (...) I offer in Section 6 a new approach to causation that avoids the problem. Decision-theoretic considerations also support the new approach. Section 8 develops the consequences of the new theory for causal explanation. The resulting theory of causal explanation incorporates the new insights while respecting important work on scientific explanation by Salmon (1971), Railton (1981), and Humphreys (1989). My conclusions are enumerated in Section 9. (shrink)

It is argued that it is not sufficient to consider only the sentences included in the explanans and explanandum when determining whether they constitute an explanation, but these sentences must always be evaluated relative to a knowledge situation. The central criterion on an explanation is that the explanans in a non-trivial way increases the belief value of the explanandum, where the belief value of a sentence is determined from the given knowledge situation. The outlined theory of explanations is applied to (...) some well-known examples and is also compared to other theories of explanation. (shrink)

In this important book, Ellery Eells explores and refines philosophical conceptions of probabilistic causality. In a probabilistic theory of causation, causes increase the probability of their effects rather than necessitate their effects in the ways traditional deterministic theories have specified. Philosophical interest in this subject arises from attempts to understand population sciences as well as indeterminism in physics. Taking into account issues involving spurious correlation, probabilistic causal interaction, disjunctive causal factors, and temporal ideas, Professor Eells advances the analysis of what (...) it is for one factor to be a positive causal factor for another. A salient feature of the book is a theory of token level probabilistic causation in which the evolution of the probability of a later event from an earlier event is central. This will be a book of crucial significance to philosophers of science and metaphysicians; it will also prove stimulating to many economists, psychologists, and physicists. (shrink)