Switch to: Citations

Add references

You must login to add references.
  1. (1 other version)Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.Wesley C. Salmon - 1984 - Princeton University Press.
    The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. Professor Salmon's theory furnishes a robust (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1053 citations  
  • Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation.Michael Strevens - 2008 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    Approaches to explanation -- Causal and explanatory relevance -- The kairetic account of /D making -- The kairetic account of explanation -- Extending the kairetic account -- Event explanation and causal claims -- Regularity explanation -- Abstraction in regularity explanation -- Approaches to probabilistic explanation -- Kairetic explanation of frequencies -- Kairetic explanation of single outcomes -- Looking outward -- Looking inward.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   515 citations  
  • 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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   518 citations  
  • Idealization and the Aims of Science.Angela Potochnik - 2017 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    Science is the study of our world, as it is in its messy reality. Nonetheless, science requires idealization to function—if we are to attempt to understand the world, we have to find ways to reduce its complexity. Idealization and the Aims of Science shows just how crucial idealization is to science and why it matters. Beginning with the acknowledgment of our status as limited human agents trying to make sense of an exceedingly complex world, Angela Potochnik moves on to explain (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   155 citations  
  • (1 other version)Causality and explanation.Wesley C. Salmon - 1998 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Wesley Salmon is renowned for his seminal contributions to the philosophy of science. He has powerfully and permanently shaped discussion of such issues as lawlike and probabilistic explanation and the interrelation of explanatory notions to causal notions. This unique volume brings together twenty-six of his essays on subjects related to causality and explanation, written over the period 1971-1995. Six of the essays have never been published before and many others have only appeared in obscure venues. The volume includes a section (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   344 citations  
  • Aspects of scientific explanation.Carl G. Hempel - 1965 - In Carl Gustav Hempel (ed.), Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: The Free Press. pp. 504.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   926 citations  
  • The New Mechanical Philosophy.Stuart Glennan - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   126 citations  
  • (1 other version)Studies in the logic of explanation.Carl Gustav Hempel & Paul Oppenheim - 1948 - Philosophy of Science 15 (2):135-175.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   731 citations  
  • Explanation: a mechanist alternative.William Bechtel & Adele Abrahamsen - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):421-441.
    Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ diagrams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   565 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   663 citations  
  • The nature of explanation.Peter Achinstein - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Offering a new approach to scientific explanation, this book focuses initially on the explaining act itself.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   226 citations  
  • (1 other version)Studies in the Logic of Explanation.Carl Hempel & Paul Oppenheim - 1948 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 14 (2):133-133.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   581 citations  
  • (1 other version)Four Decades of Scientific Explanation.Wesley C. Salmon & Anne Fagot-Largeault - 1989 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 16 (2):355.
    As Aristotle stated, scientific explanation is based on deductive argument--yet, Wesley C. Salmon points out, not all deductive arguments are qualified explanations. The validity of the explanation must itself be examined. _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_ provides a comprehensive account of the developments in scientific explanation that transpired in the last four decades of the twentieth century. It continues to stand as the most comprehensive treatment of the writings on the subject during these years. Building on the historic 1948 essay (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   559 citations  
  • (1 other version)Rethinking mechanistic explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S342-353.
    Philosophers of science typically associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon's account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex-systems approach avoids certain (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   417 citations  
  • The function of general laws in history.Carl Gustav Hempel - 1942 - Journal of Philosophy 39 (2):35-48.
    The classic logical positivist account of historical explanation, putting forward what is variously called the "regularity interpretation" (#Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation), the "covering law model" (#Dray, Laws and Explanation in History), or the "deductive model" (Michael #Scriven, "Truisms as Grounds for Historical Explanations"). See also #Danto, Narration and Knowledge, for further criticisms of the model. Hempel formalizes historical explanation as involving (a) statements of determining (initial and boundary) conditions for the event to be explained, and (b) statements of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   246 citations  
  • (1 other version)Aspects of Scientific Explanation.Asa Kasher - 1965 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 37 (4):747-749.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   450 citations  
  • (1 other version)Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (S3):S342-S353.
    Philosophers of science typically associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon's account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex-systems approach avoids certain (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   440 citations  
  • Are More Details Better? On the Norms of Completeness for Mechanistic Explanations.Carl F. Craver & David M. Kaplan - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (1):287-319.
    Completeness is an important but misunderstood norm of explanation. It has recently been argued that mechanistic accounts of scientific explanation are committed to the thesis that models are complete only if they describe everything about a mechanism and, as a corollary, that incomplete models are always improved by adding more details. If so, mechanistic accounts are at odds with the obvious and important role of abstraction in scientific modelling. We respond to this characterization of the mechanist’s views about abstraction and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   61 citations  
  • Fiction As a Vehicle for Truth: Moving Beyond the Ontic Conception.Alisa Bokulich - 2016 - The Monist 99 (3):260-279.
    Despite widespread evidence that fictional models play an explanatory role in science, resistance remains to the idea that fictions can explain. A central source of this resistance is a particular view about what explanations are, namely, the ontic conception of explanation. According to the ontic conception, explanations just are the concrete entities in the world. I argue this conception is ultimately incoherent and that even a weaker version of the ontic conception fails. Fictional models can succeed in offering genuine explanations (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  • Representing and Explaining: The Eikonic Conception of Scientific Explanation.Alisa Bokulich - 2018 - Philosophy of Science (5):793-805.
    The ontic conception of explanation, according to which explanations are "full-bodied things in the world," is fundamentally misguided. I argue instead for what I call the eikonic conception, according to which explanations are the product of an epistemic activity involving representations of the phenomena to be explained. What is explained in the first instance is a particular conceptualization of the explanandum phenomenon, contextualized within a given research program or explanatory project. I conclude that this eikonic conception has a number of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Explanatory knowledge and metaphysical dependence.Jaegwon Kim - 1994 - Philosophical Issues 5:51-69.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   164 citations  
  • (1 other version)Mental mechanisms: Philosophical perspectives on the sciences of cognition and the brain.William P. Bechtel - manuscript
    1. The Naturalistic Turn in Philosophy of Science 2. The Framework of Mechanistic Explanation: Parts, Operations, and Organization 3. Representing and Reasoning About Mechanisms 4. Mental Mechanisms: Mechanisms that Process Information 5. Discovering Mental Mechanisms 6 . Summary.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   95 citations  
  • Explaining Explanation.David-Hillel Ruben - 1990 - Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
    This book introduces readers to the topic of explanation. The insights of Plato, Aristotle, J.S. Mill and Carl Hempel are examined, and are used to argue against the view that explanation is merely a problem for the philosophy of science. Having established its importance for understanding knowledge in general, the book concludes with a bold and original explanation of explanation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   68 citations  
  • Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. Wesley Salmon.James H. Fetzer - 1987 - Philosophy of Science 54 (4):597-610.
    If the decades of the forties through the sixties were dominated by discussion of Hempel's “covering law“ explication of explanation, that of the seventies was preoccupied with Salmon's “statistical relevance” conception, which emerged as the principal alternative to Hempel's enormously influential account. Readers of Wesley C. Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, therefore, ought to find it refreshing to discover that its author has not remained content with a facile defense of his previous investigations; on the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   158 citations  
  • (1 other version)Scientific representation.Mauricio Suárez - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (1):91-101.
    Scientific representation is a currently booming topic, both in analytical philosophy and in history and philosophy of science. The analytical inquiry attempts to come to terms with the relation between theory and world; while historians and philosophers of science aim to develop an account of the practice of model building in the sciences. This article provides a review of recent work within both traditions, and ultimately argues for a practice-based account of the means employed by scientists to effectively achieve representation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   95 citations  
  • Aspects of Scientific Explanation.Michael D. Resnik - 1966 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 27 (1):139-140.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   149 citations  
  • Mechanistic explanation without the ontic conception.Cory Wright - 2012 - European Journal of Philosophy of Science 2 (3):375-394.
    The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers of science, many of whom have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • Scientific understanding: truth or dare?Henk W. de Regt - 2015 - Synthese 192 (12):3781-3797.
    It is often claimed—especially by scientific realists—that science provides understanding of the world only if its theories are (at least approximately) true descriptions of reality, in its observable as well as unobservable aspects. This paper critically examines this ‘realist thesis’ concerning understanding. A crucial problem for the realist thesis is that (as study of the history and practice of science reveals) understanding is frequently obtained via theories and models that appear to be highly unrealistic or even completely fictional. So we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  • The Explanatory Power of Network Models.Carl F. Craver - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (5):698-709.
    Network analysis is increasingly used to discover and represent the organization of complex systems. Focusing on examples from neuroscience in particular, I argue that whether network models explain, how they explain, and how much they explain cannot be answered for network models generally but must be answered by specifying an explanandum, by addressing how the model is applied to the system, and by specifying which kinds of relations count as explanatory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • (1 other version)Scientific representation.Mauricio Suárez - 2014 - Oxford Bibliographies Online.
    Scientific representation is a booming field nowadays within the philosophy of science, with many papers published regularly on the topic every year, and several yearly conferences and workshops held on related topics. Historically, the topic originates in two different strands in 20th-century philosophy of science. One strand begins in the 1950s, with philosophical interest in the nature of scientific theories. As the received or “syntactic” view gave way to a “semantic” or “structural” conception, representation progressively gained the center stage. Yet, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  • (3 other versions)The Facts of Causation.I. Hinkfuss & D. H. Mellor - 1997 - Philosophical Books 38 (1):1-11.
    Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. The Facts of Causation , now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   97 citations  
  • Mechanistic Explanation: Integrating the Ontic and Epistemic.Phyllis Illari - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (2):237-255.
    Craver claims that mechanistic explanation is ontic, while Bechtel claims that it is epistemic. While this distinction between ontic and epistemic explanation originates with Salmon, the ideas have changed in the modern debate on mechanistic explanation, where the frame of the debate is changing. I will explore what Bechtel and Craver’s claims mean, and argue that good mechanistic explanations must satisfy both ontic and epistemic normative constraints on what is a good explanation. I will argue for ontic constraints by drawing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   51 citations  
  • Coherence as Constraint Satisfaction.Paul Thagard & Karsten Verbeurgt - 1998 - Cognitive Science 22 (1):1-24.
    This paper provides a computational characterization of coherence that applies to a wide range of philosophical problems and psychological phenomena. Maximizing coherence is a matter of maximizing satisfaction of a set of positive and negative constraints. After comparing five algorithms for maximizing coherence, we show how our characterization of coherence overcomes traditional philosophical objections about circularity and truth.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   91 citations  
  • The Chances of Explanation.Paul Humphreys - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (1):353-374.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   82 citations  
  • (3 other versions)The Facts of Causation.D. H. Mellor - 1995 - Philosophical Quarterly 48 (193):550-552.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   81 citations  
  • Mechanisms and psychological explanation.Cory Wright & William Bechtel - 2006 - In Paul Thagard (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science. Elsevier.
    As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning about mechanisms. We discuss the manner in which mechanistic approaches serve to bridge levels rather than (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  • Models and Cognition: Prediction and Explanation in Everyday Life and in Science.Jonathan A. Waskan - 2006 - Bradford.
    Jonathan Walkan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic model of mental representation. That logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem---the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes available. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • Explanation in two dimensions: Diagrams and biological explanation.Laura Perini - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):257-269.
    Molecular biologists and biochemists often use diagrams to present hypotheses. Analysis of diagrams shows that their content can be expressed with linguistic representations. Why do biologists use visual representations instead? One reason is simple comprehensibility: some diagrams present information which is readily understood from the diagram format, but which would not be comprehensible if the same information was expressed linguistically. But often diagrams are used even when concise, comprehensible linguistic alternatives are available. I explain this phenomenon by showing why diagrammatic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  • Explanation and epistemology.William G. Lycan - 2002 - In Paul K. Moser (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology. New York: Oup Usa. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • (1 other version)Re-reconciling the Epistemic and Ontic Views of Explanation.Benjamin Sheredos - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (5):919-949.
    Recent attempts to reconcile the ontic and epistemic approaches to explanation propose that our best explanations simply fulfill epistemic and ontic norms simultaneously. I aim to upset this armistice. Epistemic norms of attaining general and systematic explanations are, I argue, autonomous of ontic norms: they cannot be fulfilled simultaneously or in simple conjunction with ontic norms, and plausibly have priority over them. One result is that central arguments put forth by ontic theorists against epistemic theorists are revealed as not only (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • The ontic conception of scientific explanation.Cory Wright - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 54:20-30.
    Wesley Salmon’s version of the ontic conception of explanation is a main historical root of contemporary work on mechanistic explanation. This paper examines and critiques the philosophical merits of Salmon’s version, and argues that his conception’s most fundamental construct is either fundamentally obscure, or else reduces to a non-ontic conception of explanation. Either way, the ontic conception is a misconception.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Singular and General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective.Stuart Glennan - 2011 - In Phyllis McKay Illari Federica Russo (ed.), Causality in the Sciences. Oxford University Press.
    My aim in this paper is to make a case for the singularist view from the perspective of a mechanical theory of causation, and to explain what, from this perspective, causal generalizations mean, and what role they play within the mechanical theory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • Mechanisms are Real and Local.Phyllis McKay Illari & Jon Williamson - 2011 - In Phyllis McKay Illari Federica Russo (ed.), Causality in the Sciences. Oxford University Press.
    Mechanisms have become much-discussed, yet there is still no consensus on how to characterise them. In this paper, we start with something everyone is agreed on – that mechanisms explain – and investigate what constraints this imposes on our metaphysics of mechanisms. We examine two widely shared premises about how to understand mechanistic explanation: (1) that mechanistic explanation offers a welcome alternative to traditional laws-based explanation and (2) that there are two senses of mechanistic explanation that we call ‘epistemic explanation’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • Reconciling Ontic and Epistemic Constraints on Mechanistic Explanation, Epistemically.Dingmar van Eck - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (1):5-22.
    In this paper I address the current debate on ontic versus epistemic conceptualizations of mechanistic explanation in the mechanisms literature. Illari recently argued that good explanations are subject to both ontic and epistemic constraints: they must describe mechanisms in the world (ontic aim) in such fashion that they provide understanding of their workings (epistemic aim). Elaborating upon Illari’s ‘integration’ account, I argue that causal role function discovery of mechanisms and their components is an epistemic prerequisite for achieving these two aims. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • (1 other version)An "at-at" theory of causal influence.Wesley C. Salmon - 1977 - Philosophy of Science 44 (2):215-224.
    The propagation of causal influences through space-time seems to play a fundamental role in scientific explanation. Taking as a point of departure a basic distinction between causal interactions (which are localized in space-time) and causal processes (which may extend through vast regions of space-time), this paper attempts an analysis of the concept of causal propagation on the basis of the ability of causal processes to transmit "marks." The analysis rests upon the "at-at" theory of motion which has figured prominently in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Romeo, René, and the reasons why: What explanation is.C. S. Jenkins - 2008 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt1):61-84.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • More telltale signs: What attention to representation reveals about scientific explanation.Andrea I. Woody - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (5):780-793.
    This essay explores the connection between representation and explanation in the sciences. I suggest that scientific representation schemes be viewed as pragmatic tools for acquiring the sort of articulated awareness that is the hallmark of nontrivial knowledge. Crystal field theory in chemistry illustrates this perspective. Certain representations achieve the status of being paradigmatically explanatory, thereby shaping models of intelligibility. In turn, these explanatory preferences serve largely to define and differentiate disciplinary communities by implicitly endorsing particular epistemic aims and values. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • On the nature of explanation: A PDP approach.Paul M. Churchland - 1989 - In A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. MIT Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • Explanation explained.Jan Faye - 1999 - Synthese 120 (1):61-75.
    Many philosophers consider explanation to be objective such that facts explain facts independently of human beings. This paper rejects such an ontological view and argues in favor of an epistemic view, named the pragmatic-rhetorical view, according to which explanations depend on our knowledge and are grounded in the public or scientific discourse.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Causal Relata: Tokens, Types, or Variables?Daniel Murray Hausman - 2005 - Erkenntnis 63 (1):33-54.
    The literature on causation distinguishes between causal claims relating properties or types and causal claims relating individuals or tokens. Many authors maintain that corresponding to these two kinds of causal claims are two different kinds of causal relations. Whether to regard causal relations among variables as yet another variety of causation is also controversial. This essay maintains that causal relations obtain among tokens and that type causal claims are generalizations concerning causal relations among these tokens.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations