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  1. Dissecting explanatory power.Petri Ylikoski & Jaakko Kuorikoski - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (2):201–219.
    Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach (...)
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  • Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation.James F. Woodward - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Woodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.
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  • (1 other version)Revisiting “scale-free” networks.Evelyn Fox Keller - 2005 - Bioessays 27 (10):1060-1068.
    Recent observations of power-law distributions in the connectivity of complex networks came as a big surprise to researchers steeped in the tradition of random networks. Even more surprising was the discovery that power-law distributions also characterize many biological and social networks. Many attributed a deep significance to this fact, inferring a “universal architecture” of complex systems. Closer examination, however, challenges the assumptions that (1) such distributions are special and (2) they signify a common architecture, independent of the system's specifics. The (...)
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  • Realistic realism about unrealistic models.Uskali Mäki - 2009 - In Don Ross & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics. New York: Oxford University Press.
    My philosophical intuitions are those of a scientific realist. In addition to being realist in its philosophical outlook, my philosophy of economics also aspires to be realistic in the sense of being descriptively adequate, or at least normatively non-utopian, about economics as a scientific discipline. The special challenge my philosophy of economics must meet is to provide a scientific realist account that is realistic of a discipline that deals with a complex subject matter and operates with highly unrealistic models. Unrealisticness (...)
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  • The productive tension : mechanisms vs. templates in modeling the phenomena.Tarja Knuuttila & Andrea Loettgers - 2011 - In Paul Humphreys & Cyrille Imbert (eds.), Models, Simulations, and Representations. New York: Routledge.
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  • The multiple realizability argument against reductionism.Elliott Sober - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (4):542-564.
    Reductionism is often understood to include two theses: (1) every singular occurrence that the special sciences can explain also can be explained by physics; (2) every law in a higher-level science can be explained by physics. These claims are widely supposed to have been refuted by the multiple realizability argument, formulated by Putnam (1967, 1975) and Fodor (1968, 1975). The present paper criticizes the argument and identifies a reductionistic thesis that follows from one of the argument's premises.
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  • Two Uses of Unification.Elliott Sober - 2003 - Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 10:205-216.
    Carl Hempel1 set the tone for subsequent philosophical work on scientific explanation by resolutely locating the problem he wanted to address outside of epistemology. “Hempel’s problem,” as I will call it, was not to say what counts as evidence that X is the explanation of Y. Rather, the question was what it means for X to explain Y. Hempel’s theory of explanation and its successors don’t tell you what to believe; instead, they tell you which of your beliefs (if any) (...)
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  • Idealization and abstraction: A framework.Martin R. Jones - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 86 (1):173-218.
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  • (1 other version)Explaining the brain: mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience.Carl F. Craver - 2007 - New York : Oxford University Press,: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
    Carl Craver investigates what we are doing when we sue neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain.
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  • Varieties of social explanation: an introduction to the philosophy of social science.Daniel Little - 1991 - Boulder: Westview Press.
    Professor Little presents an introduction to the philosophy of social science with an emphasis on the central forms of explanation in social science: rational-intentional, causal, functional, structural, materialist, statistical and interpretive. The book is very strong on recent developments, particularly in its treatment of rational choice theory, microfoundations for social explanation, the idea of supervenience, functionalism, and current discussions of relativism.Of special interest is Professor Little’s insight that, like the philosophy of natural science, the philosophy of social science can profit (...)
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  • (1 other version)Explanatory pluralism and complementarity: From autonomy to integration.Caterina Marchionni - 2008 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (3):314-333.
    Philosophers of the social sciences are increasingly convinced that macro-and micro-explanations are complementary. Whereas macro-explanations are broad, micro-explanations are deep. I distinguish between weak and strong complementarity: Strongly complementary explanations improve one another when integrated, weakly complementary explanations do not. To demonstrate the explanatory autonomy of different levels of explanation, explanatory pluralists mostly presuppose the weak form of complementarity. By scrutinizing the notions of explanatory depth and breadth, I argue that macro- and micro-accounts of the same phenomenon are more often (...)
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  • Cause and explanation in psychiatry: An interventionist perspective.James F. Woodward - 2008 - In Kenneth S. Kendler & Josef Parnas (eds.), Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry: Explanation, Phenomenology, and Nosology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
    This paper explores some issues concerning the nature and structure of causal explanation in psychiatry and psychology from the point of view of the “interventionist” theory defended in my book, Making Things Happen. Among the issues is explored is the extent to which candidate causal explanations involving “upper level” or relatively coarse-grained or macroscopic variables such as mental/psychological states (e.g. highly self critical beliefs or low self esteem) or environmental factors (e.g. parental abuse) compete with explanations that instead appeal to (...)
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  • A Contextual Approach to Scientific Understanding.Henk W. de Regt & Dennis Dieks - 2005 - Synthese 144 (1):137-170.
    Achieving understanding of nature is one of the aims of science. In this paper we offer an analysis of the nature of scientific understanding that accords with actual scientific practice and accommodates the historical diversity of conceptions of understanding. Its core idea is a general criterion for the intelligibility of scientific theories that is essentially contextual: which theories conform to this criterion depends on contextual factors, and can change in the course of time. Our analysis provides a general account of (...)
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  • Explanatory unification.Philip Kitcher - 1981 - Philosophy of Science 48 (4):507-531.
    The official model of explanation proposed by the logical empiricists, the covering law model, is subject to familiar objections. The goal of the present paper is to explore an unofficial view of explanation which logical empiricists have sometimes suggested, the view of explanation as unification. I try to show that this view can be developed so as to provide insight into major episodes in the history of science, and that it can overcome some of the most serious difficulties besetting the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences.Richard W. Miller - 1987 - Princeton University Press.
    In this bold work of broad scope and rich erudition, Richard W. Miller sets out to reorient the philosophy of science.
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  • Fact and Method.Richard W. Miller - 1991 - Journal of Philosophy 88 (3):159-162.
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  • Model-based Explanation in the Social Sciences: Modeling Kinship Terminologies and Romantic Networks.Caterina Marchionni - 2013 - Perspectives on Science 21 (2):175-180.
    Read argues that modeling cultural idea systems serves to make explicit the cultural rules through which "cultural idea systems" frame behaviors that are culturally meaningful. Because cultural rules are typically "invisible" to us, one of the anthropologists' tasks is to elicit these rules, make them explicit and then use them to build explanations for patterns in cultural phenomena. The main example of Read's approach to cultural idea systems is the formal modeling of kinship terminologies. I reconstruct Read's modeling strategy as (...)
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  • (1 other version)Revisiting ``scale-free'' networks.Evelyn Fox Keller - 2005 - Bioessays 27 (10):1060-1068.
    Recent observations of power-law distributions in the connectivity of complex networks came as a big surprise to researchers steeped in the tradition of random networks. Even more surprising was the discovery that power-law distributions also characterize many biological and social networks. Many attributed a deep significance to this fact, inferring a “universal architecture” of complex systems. Closer examination, however, challenges the assumptions that (1) such distributions are special and (2) they signify a common architecture, independent of the system's specifics. The (...)
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  • In Defense of Explanatory Ecumenism.Frank Jackson - 1992 - Economics and Philosophy 8 (1):1-21.
    Many of the things that we try to explain, in both our common sense and our scientific engagement with the world, are capable of being explained more or less finely: that is, with greater or lesser attention to the detail of the producing mechanism. A natural assumption, pervasive if not always explicit, is that other things being equal, the more finegrained an explanation, the better. Thus, Jon Elster, who also thinks there are instrumental reasons for wanting a more fine-grained explanation, (...)
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  • Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method.Paul Humphreys - 2004 - New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    Computational methods such as computer simulations, Monte Carlo methods, and agent-based modeling have become the dominant techniques in many areas of science. Extending Ourselves contains the first systematic philosophical account of these new methods, and how they require a different approach to scientific method. Paul Humphreys draws a parallel between the ways in which such computational methods have enhanced our abilities to mathematically model the world, and the more familiar ways in which scientific instruments have expanded our access to the (...)
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  • Explanatory generalizations, part II: Plumbing explanatory depth.Christopher Hitchcock & James Woodward - 2003 - Noûs 37 (2):181–199.
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  • Models as products of interdisciplinary exchange: Evidence from evolutionary game theory.Till Grüne-Yanoff - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (2):386-397.
    The development of evolutionary game theory is closely linked with two interdisciplinary exchanges: the import of game theory into biology, and the import of biologists’ version of game theory into economics. This paper traces the history of these two import episodes. In each case the investigation covers what exactly was imported, what the motives for the import were, how the imported elements were put to use, and how they related to existing practices in the respective disciplines. Two conclusions emerged from (...)
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  • (1 other version)Explanatory Pluralism and Complementarity.Marchionni Caterina - 2008 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (3):314-333.
    Philosophers of the social sciences are increasingly convinced that macro-and micro-explanations are complementary. Whereas macro-explanations are broad, micro-explanations are deep. I distinguish between weak and strong complementarity: Strongly complementary explanations improve one another when integrated, weakly complementary explanations do not. To demonstrate the explanatory autonomy of different levels of explanation, explanatory pluralists mostly presuppose the weak form of complementarity. By scrutinizing the notions of explanatory depth and breadth, I argue that macro- and micro-accounts of the same phenomenon are more often (...)
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  • Structural balance: a generalization of Heider's theory.Dorwin Cartwright & Frank Harary - 1956 - Psychological Review 63 (5):277-293.
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  • Idealization and modeling.Robert W. Batterman - 2009 - Synthese 169 (3):427-446.
    This paper examines the role of mathematical idealization in describing and explaining various features of the world. It examines two cases: first, briefly, the modeling of shock formation using the idealization of the continuum. Second, and in more detail, the breaking of droplets from the points of view of both analytic fluid mechanics and molecular dynamical simulations at the nano-level. It argues that the continuum idealizations are explanatorily ineliminable and that a full understanding of certain physical phenomena cannot be obtained (...)
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  • Asymptotics and the role of minimal models.Robert W. Batterman - 2002 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (1):21-38.
    A traditional view of mathematical modeling holds, roughly, that the more details of the phenomenon being modeled that are represented in the model, the better the model is. This paper argues that often times this ‘details is better’ approach is misguided. One ought, in certain circumstances, to search for an exactly solvable minimal model—one which is, essentially, a caricature of the physics of the phenomenon in question.
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  • The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics.Daniel M. Hausman - 1992 - Cambridge University Press.
    This book offers a comprehensive overview of the structure, strategy and methods of assessment of orthodox theoretical economics. In Part I Professor Hausman explains how economists theorise, emphasising the essential underlying commitment of economists to a vision of economics as a separate science. In Part II he defends the view that the basic axioms of economics are 'inexact' since they deal only with the 'major' causes; unlike most writers on economic methodology, the author argues that it is the rules that (...)
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  • The Methodology of Economics: Or, How Economists Explain.Mark Blaug - 1992 - Cambridge University Press.
    This book is an examination of the nature of economic explanation. The opening chapters introduce current thinking in the philosophy of science and review the literature on methodology. Professor Blaug then turns to the troublesome question of the logical status of welfare economics, giving the reader an understanding of the outstanding issues in the methodology of economics. This is followed by a series of case studies of leading economic controversies, which shows how controversies in economics may be illuminated by paying (...)
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  • Explanation.Julian Reiss - 2008 - In New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
    Explaining socio-economic phenomena is one important aim of economics. There is very little agreement, however, on what precisely constitutes an adequate economic explanation. Starting from the very influential but defective ‘deductive-nomological model’ of explanation, this article describes and criticizes the major contemporary competitors for such an account (the probabilistic–causal, the mechanistic–causal and the unificationist models) and argues that none of them can by itself capture all aspects of a good explanation. When seeking to explain a socio-economic phenomenon it should therefore (...)
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  • Connections: An Introduction to the Economics of Networks.Sanjeev Goyal - 2009 - Princeton University Press.
    Networks pervade social and economic life, and they play a prominent role in explaining a huge variety of social and economic phenomena. Standard economic theory did not give much credit to the role of networks until the early 1990s, but since then the study of the theory of networks has blossomed. At the heart of this research is the idea that the pattern of connections between individual rational agents shapes their actions and determines their rewards. The importance of connections has (...)
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  • (1 other version)Explaining the Brain.Carl F. Craver - 2007 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.
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  • The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics by Daniel M. Hausman. [REVIEW]Alex Rosenberg - 1993 - Journal of Philosophy 90 (10):533-537.
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  • Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling.Joshua M. Epstein - 2006 - Princeton University Press.
    This book argues that this powerful technique permits the social sciences to meet an explanation, in which one 'grows' the phenomenon of interest in an artificial society of interacting agents: heterogeneous, boundedly rational actors.
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  • Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research.Harold Kincaid - 1995 - Cambridge University Press.
    This 1996 book defends the prospects for a science of society. It argues that behind the diverse methods of the natural sciences lies a common core of scientific rationality that the social sciences can and sometimes do achieve. It also argues that good social science must be in part about large-scale social structures and processes and thus that methodological individualism is misguided. These theses are supported by a detailed discussion of actual social research, including theories of agrarian revolution, organizational ecology, (...)
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  • The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think.Mary S. Morgan - 2012 - Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
    During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. (...)
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  • Some issues concerning the nature of economic explanation.Harold Kincaid - 2012 - In Uskali Mäki, Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard & John Woods (eds.), Philosophy of economics. AMSTERDAM: North Holland. pp. 137.
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