Results for 'Explanatory Relevance'

988 found
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  1. (1 other version)Expressivism about explanatory relevance.Josh Hunt - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (9):2063-2089.
    Accounts of scientific explanation disagree about what’s required for a cause, law, or other fact to be a reason why an event occurs. In short, they disagree about the conditions for explanatory relevance. Nonetheless, most accounts presuppose that claims about explanatory relevance play a descriptive role in tracking reality. By rejecting the need for this descriptivist assumption, I develop an expressivist account of explanatory relevance and explanation: to judge that an answer is explanatory (...)
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  2. Importance and Explanatory Relevance: The Case of Mathematical Explanations.Gabriel Târziu - 2018 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 49 (3):393-412.
    A way to argue that something plays an explanatory role in science is by linking explanatory relevance with importance in the context of an explanation. The idea is deceptively simple: a part of an explanation is an explanatorily relevant part of that explanation if removing it affects the explanation either by destroying it or by diminishing its explanatory power, i.e. an important part is an explanatorily relevant part. This can be very useful in many ontological debates. (...)
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  3. Probabilistic causation and the explanatory role of natural selection.Pablo Razeto-Barry & Ramiro Frick - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (3):344-355.
    The explanatory role of natural selection is one of the long-term debates in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, the consensus has been slippery because conceptual confusions and the absence of a unified, formal causal model that integrates different explanatory scopes of natural selection. In this study we attempt to examine two questions: (i) What can the theory of natural selection explain? and (ii) Is there a causal or explanatory model that integrates all natural selection explananda? For the first question, (...)
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  4. Explanatory Depth in Primordial Cosmology: A Comparative Study of Inflationary and Bouncing Paradigms.William J. Wolf & Karim Pierre Yves Thébault - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    We develop and apply a multi-dimensional account of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial conditions fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches (...)
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  5. Grounding, Necessity, and Relevance.Salim Hireche - 2023 - Philosophical Studies:1-22.
    Grounding necessitarianism (GN) is the view that full grounds necessitate what they ground. Although GN has been rather popular among philosophers, it faces important counterexamples: For instance, A=[Socrates died] fully grounds C=[Xanthippe became a widow]. However, A fails to necessitate C: A could have obtained together with B=[Socrates and Xanthippe were never married], without C obtaining. In many cases, the debate essentially reduces to whether A indeed fully grounds C – as the contingentist claims – or if instead C is (...)
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  6. Mapping Explanatory Language in Neuroscience.Daniel Kostić & Willem Halffman - 2023 - Synthese 202 (112):1-27.
    The philosophical literature on scientific explanation in neuroscience has been dominated by the idea of mechanisms. The mechanist philosophers often claim that neuroscience is in the business of finding mechanisms. This view has been challenged in numerous ways by showing that there are other successful and widespread explanatory strategies in neuroscience. However, the empirical evidence for all these claims was hitherto lacking. Empirical evidence about the pervasiveness and uses of various explanatory strategies in neuroscience is particularly needed because (...)
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  7. Explanatoriness and Evidence: A Reply to McCain and Poston.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2014 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (3):193-199.
    We argue elsewhere that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant . Let H be some hypothesis, O some observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then O screens-off E from H: Pr = Pr. This thesis, hereafter “SOT” , is defended by appeal to a representative case. The case concerns smoking and lung cancer. McCain and Poston grant that SOT holds in cases, like our case concerning smoking and lung cancer, that involve frequency (...)
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  8. The Explanatory Gap Account and Intelligibility of Explanation.Daniel Kostic - 2011 - Theoria 54 (3):27-42.
    This paper examines the explanatory gap account. The key notions for its proper understanding are analysed. In particular, the analysis is concerned with the role of “thick” and “thin” modes of presentation and “thick” and “thin” concepts which are relevant for the notions of “thick” and “thin” conceivability, and to that effect relevant for the gappy and non-gappy identities. The last section of the paper discusses the issue of the intelligibility of explanations. One of the conclusions is that the (...)
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  9. Explanatory Information in Mathematical Explanations of Physical Phenomena.Manuel Barrantes - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (3):590-603.
    In this paper I defend an intermediate position between the ‘bare mathematical results’ view and the ‘transmission’ view of mathematical explanations of physical phenomena (MEPPs). I argue that, in MEPPs, it is not enough to deduce the explanandum from the generalizations cited in the explanans. Rather, we must add information regarding why those generalizations obtain. However, I also argue that it is not necessary to provide explanatory proofs of the mathematical theorems that represent those generalizations. I illustrate this with (...)
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  10. Explanatory completeness and idealization in large brain simulations: a mechanistic perspective.Marcin Miłkowski - 2016 - Synthese 193 (5):1457-1478.
    The claim defended in the paper is that the mechanistic account of explanation can easily embrace idealization in big-scale brain simulations, and that only causally relevant detail should be present in explanatory models. The claim is illustrated with two methodologically different models: Blue Brain, used for particular simulations of the cortical column in hybrid models, and Eliasmith’s SPAUN model that is both biologically realistic and able to explain eight different tasks. By drawing on the mechanistic theory of computational explanation, (...)
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  11. The Unconscious Mind Worry: A Mechanistic-Explanatory Strategy.Beate Krickel - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):39-59.
    Recent findings in different areas of psychology and cognitive science have brought the unconscious mind back to center stage. However, the unconscious mind worry remains: What renders unconscious phenomena mental? I suggest a new strategy for answering this question, which rests on the idea that categorizing unconscious phenomena as “mental” should be scientifically useful relative to the explanatory research goals. I argue that this is the case if by categorizing an unconscious phenomenon as “mental” one picks out explanatorily relevant (...)
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  12. The Implausibility and Low Explanatory Power of the Resurrection Hypothesis—With a Rejoinder to Stephen T. Davis.Robert Greg Cavin & Carlos A. Colombetti - 2020 - Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry 2 (1):37-94.
    We respond to Stephen T. Davis’ criticism of our earlier essay, “Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis.” We argue that the Standard Model of physics is relevant and decisive in establishing the implausibility and low explanatory power of the Resurrection hypothesis. We also argue that the laws of physics have entailments regarding God and the supernatural and, against Alvin Plantinga, that these same laws lack the proviso “no agent supernaturally interferes.” Finally, we offer Bayesian arguments for the Legend hypothesis and against (...)
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  13. Transparency and the explanatory gap.Kelly Trogdon - forthcoming - In G. Rabin, Grounding and Consciousness. Oxford University Press. pp. 1-21.
    Grounding-theoretic account of the notion of transparency relevant to the explanatory gap between the mental and physical.
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  14. Explanatory reasoning in the material theory of induction.William Peden - 2022 - Metascience 31 (3):303-309.
    In his recent book, John Norton has created a theory of inference to the best explanation, within the context of his "material theory of induction". I apply it to the problem of scientific explanations that are false: if we want the theories in our explanations to be true, then why do historians and scientists often say that false theories explained phenomena? I also defend Norton's theory against some possible objections.
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  15. Relevance and Conditionals: A Synopsis of Open Pragmatic and Semantic Issues.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2020 - In S. Elqayam, Igor Douven, J. St B. T. Evans & N. Cruz, Logic and uncertainty in the human mind: a tribute to David E. Over. Routledge.
    Recently several papers have reported relevance effects on the cognitive assessments of indicative conditionals, which pose an explanatory challenge to the Suppositional Theory of conditionals advanced by David Over, which is influential in the psychology of reasoning. Some of these results concern the “Equation” (P(if A, then C) = P(C|A)), others the de Finetti truth table, and yet others the uncertain and-to-inference task. The purpose of this chapter is to take a Birdseye view on the debate and investigate (...)
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  16. Virtue Epistemology and Explanatory Salience.Georgi Gardiner - 2018 - In Heather D. Battaly, The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology. Routledge.
    Robust virtue epistemology holds that knowledge is true belief obtained through cognitive ability. In this essay I explain that robust virtue epistemology faces a dilemma, and the viability of the theory depends on an adequate understanding of the ‘through’ relation. Greco interprets this ‘through’ relation as one of causal explanation; the success is through the agent’s abilities iff the abilities play a sufficiently salient role in a causal explanation of why she possesses a true belief. In this paper I argue (...)
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  17. The mind-body problem and explanatory dualism.Nicholas Maxwell - 2000 - Philosophy 75 (291):49-71.
    An important part of the mind-brain problem arises because sentience and consciousness seem inherently resistant to scientific explanation and understanding. The solution to this dilemma is to recognize, first, that scientific explanation can only render comprehensible a selected aspect of what there is, and second, that there is a mode of explanation and understanding, the personalistic, quite different from, but just as viable as, scientific explanation. In order to understand the mental aspect of brain processes - that aspect we know (...)
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  18. The Dependence Response and Explanatory Loops.Andrew Law - 2020 - Faith and Philosophy 37 (3):294-307.
    There is an old and powerful argument for the claim that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A recent response to this argument, sometimes called the “dependence response,” centers around the claim that God’s relevant past beliefs depend on the relevant agent’s current or future behavior in a certain way. This paper offers a new argument for the dependence response, one that revolves around different cases of time travel. Somewhat serendipitously, the argument also paves the way (...)
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  19. The proximate–ultimate distinction and evolutionary developmental biology: causal irrelevance versus explanatory abstraction.Massimo Pigliucci & Raphael Scholl - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):653-670.
    Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction has received renewed interest in recent years. Here we discuss its role in arguments about the relevance of developmental to evolutionary biology. We show that two recent critiques of the proximate–ultimate distinction fail to explain why developmental processes in particular should be of interest to evolutionary biologists. We trace these failures to a common problem: both critiques take the proximate–ultimate distinction to neglect specific causal interactions in nature. We argue that this is implausible, and that the (...)
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  20. On the Role of Erotetic Constraints in Non-causal Explanations.Daniel Kostić - 2024 - Philosophy of Science 91 (5):1078-1088.
    In non-causal explanations, some non-causal facts (such as mathematical, modal or metaphysical) are used to explain some physical facts. However, precisely because these explanations abstract away from causal facts, they face two challenges: 1) it is not clear why would one rather than the other non-causal explanantia be relevant for the explanandum; and 2) why would standing in a particular explanatory relation (e.g., “counterfactual dependence”, “constraint”, “entailment”, “constitution”, “grounding”, and so on), and not in some other, be explanatory. (...)
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  21.  77
    Representational cognitive pluralism: towards a cognitive science of relevance-sensitivity.Carlos Barth - 2024 - Dissertation, Federal University of Minas Gerais
    This work aims to contribute to the explanation of cognitive capacities that are essential to human intelligence: commonsense and situation holism. The attempt to explain them within the field of cognitive sciences raises a foundational challenge. How can human cognition distinguish what’s relevant and what’s not in an open-ended set of contexts? The challenge is characterized by a circularity. Potential solutions end up relying on the very capacity that they should be explaining, i.e. the sensitivity to what’s contextually relevant. The (...)
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  22. Indigenous People Mathematics Teachers’ Beliefs and Teaching Practices: An Explanatory Sequential Analysis.Alexis Tancontian, Ivy Lyt Abina & Orville Evardo Jr - 2024 - Journal of Interdisciplinary Perspectives 2 (6):77-94.
    Indigenous communities have a rich cultural heritage encompassing diverse ways of knowing, learning, and understanding the world around them. This mixed methods study utilized the explanatory sequential design to determine the level and relationship of the IP mathematics teachers' beliefs and teaching practices and gain a deeper insight into these beliefs and attitudes. There are 115 respondents for the quantitative phase, while 10 participants in the qualitative phase. Data were collected through survey and key informant interviews and were analyzed (...)
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  23. Is Religion a Necessary Condition for the Emergence of Knowledge? Some Explanatory Hypotheses.Viorel Rotila - 2019 - Postmodern Openings 10 (3):202-228.
    By using the general investigation framework offered by the cognitive science of religion (CSR), I analyse religion as a necessary condition for the evolutionary path of knowledge. The main argument is the "paradox of the birth of knowledge": in order to get to the meaning of the part, a sense context is needed; but a sense of the whole presupposes the sense (meaning) of the parts. Religion proposes solutions to escape this paradox, based on the imagination of sense (meaning) contexts, (...)
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  24. An Idle Threat: Epiphenomenalism Exposed.Paul Raymont - 1999 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    In this doctoral dissertation I consider, and reject, the claim that recent varieties of non-reductive physicalism, particularly Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, are committed to a new kind of epiphenomenalism. Non-reductive physicalists identify each mental event with a physical event, and are thus entitled to the belief that mental events are causes, since the physical events with which they are held to be identical are causes. However, Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa and others have argued that if we follow the non-reductive physicalist (...)
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  25. Empiricism, Objectivity, and Explanation.Elisabeth A. Lloyd & Carl G. Anderson - 1993 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 18 (1):121-131.
    We sley Salmon, in his influential and detailed book, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, argues that the pragmatic approach to scientific explanation, “construed as the claim that scientific explanation can be explicated entirely in pragmatic terms” (1989, 185) is inadequate. The specific inadequacy ascribed to a pragmatic account is that objective relevance relations cannot be incorporated into such an account. Salmon relies on the arguments given in Kitcher and Salmon (1987) to ground this objection. He also suggests that Peter (...)
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  26. A Theory of Practical Meaning.Carlotta Pavese - 2017 - Philosophical Topics 45 (2):65-96.
    This essay is divided into two parts. In the first part (§2), I introduce the idea of practical meaning by looking at a certain kind of procedural systems — the motor system — that play a central role in computational explanations of motor behavior. I argue that in order to give a satisfactory account of the content of the representations computed by motor systems (motor commands), we need to appeal to a distinctively practical kind of meaning. Defending the explanatory (...)
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  27. Knowledge and Opinion about the same thing in APo A-33.Lucas Angioni - 2013 - Dois Pontos 10 (2):255-290.
    This paper discusses the contrast between scientific knowledge and opinion as it is presented by Aristotle in Posterior Analytics A.33. Aristotle's contrast is formulated in terms of understanding or not understanding some "necessary items". I claim that the contrast can only be understood in terms of explanatory relevance. The "necessary items" are middle terms (or explanatory factors) that are necessary for the fully appropriate explanation. This approach gives a coherent interpretation of each step in the chapter.
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  28. What is social structural explanation? A causal account.Lauren N. Ross - 2023 - Noûs 1 (1):163-179.
    Social scientists appeal to various “structures” in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that social structure can be explanatory in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A (...)
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  29. The Negative View of Natural Selection.Jonathan Birch - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2):569-573.
    An influential argument due to Elliott Sober, subsequently strengthened by Denis Walsh and Joel Pust, moves from plausible premises to the bold conclusion that natural selection cannot explain the traits of individual organisms. If the argument were sound, the explanatory scope of selection would depend, surprisingly, on metaphysical considerations concerning origin essentialism. I show that the Sober-Walsh-Pust argument rests on a flawed counterfactual criterion for explanatory relevance. I further show that a more defensible criterion for explanatory (...)
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  30. Problems of Religious Luck, Chapter 6: The Pattern Stops Here?Guy Axtell - 2018 - In Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement. Lanham, MD, USA & London, UK: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield.
    This book has argued that problems of religious luck, especially when operationalized into concerns about doxastic risk and responsibility, can be of shared interest to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. We have pointed out counter-inductive thinking as a key feature of fideistic models of faith, and examined the implications of this point both for the social scientific study of fundamentalism, and for philosophers’ and theologians’ normative concerns with the reasonableness of a) exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, and b) theologically-cast but bias-mirroring (...)
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  31. Overcoming Expert Disagreement In A Delphi Process. An Exercise In Reverse Epistemology.Lalumera Elisabetta - 2015 - Humana Mente 8 (28):87-103.
    Disagreement among experts is a central topic in social epistemology. What should an expert do when confronted with the different opinion of an epistemic peer? Possible answers include the steadfast view (holding to one’s belief), the abstemious view (suspending one’s judgment), and moderate conciliatory views, which specify criteria for belief change when a peer’s different opinion is encountered. The practice of Delphi techniques in healthcare, medicine, and social sciences provides a real-life case study of expert disagreement, where disagreement is gradually (...)
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  32. Dispositional explanations in dualism.Janko Nesic - 2013 - Filozofija I Društvo 24 (4):218-241.
    In order to defend mental explanations dualists may appeal to dispositions (powers). By accepting a powers theory of causation, a dualist can more plausibly defend mental explanations that are given independently of physical explanations. Accepting a power-based theory still comes with a price. Absences and double preventers are not causes in a powers theory, and solutions based on them can only defend their explanatory relevance in mental explanations. There is still a chance that such mental explanations can be (...)
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  33. Inference to the Best Explanation and the Screening-Off Challenge.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 38:121-142.
    We argue in Roche and Sober (2013) that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in that Pr(H | O&EXPL) = Pr(H | O), where H is a hypothesis, O is an observation, and EXPL is the proposition that if H and O were true, then H would explain O. This is a “screening-off” thesis. Here we clarify that thesis, reply to criticisms advanced by Lange (2017), consider alternative formulations of Inference to the Best Explanation, discuss a strengthened screening-off thesis, and consider how (...)
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  34. Carroll’s Regress Times Three.Gilbert Plumer - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (4):551-571.
    I show that in our theoretical representations of argument, vicious infinite regresses of self-reference may arise with respect to each of the three usual, informal criteria of argument cogency: the premises are to be relevant, sufficient, and acceptable. They arise needlessly, by confusing a cogency criterion with argument content. The three types of regress all are structurally similar to Lewis Carroll’s famous regress, which involves quantitative extravagance with no explanatory power. Most attention is devoted to the sufficiency criterion, including (...)
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  35. A Noetic Account of Explanation in Mathematics.William D’Alessandro & Ellen Lehet - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    We defend a noetic account of intramathematical explanation. On this view, a piece of mathematics is explanatory just in case it produces understanding of an appropriate type. We motivate the view by presenting some appealing features of noeticism. We then discuss and criticize the most prominent extant version of noeticism, due to Inglis and Mejía Ramos, which identifies explanatory understanding with the possession of well-organized cognitive schemas. Finally, we present a novel noetic account. On our view, explanatory (...)
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  36.  61
    Some Remarks Concerning the Concept of Glocalization.Viorel Vizureanu - 2013 - Public Reason 5 (1).
    The present study is aimed to scan the explanatory relevance of the concept of glocalization in some seminal works of George Ritzer. In the first instance, we will try to relate the manner in which Ritzer understands glocalization to the uses of other authors or other related concepts of the cultural globalization theory. On this occasion, we will reveal the cultural and philosophical assumptions, underlying Ritzer’s use of this concept: the understanding of the individual, mainly seen as a (...)
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  37. Epistemological status of rationality principles in the social sciences: a structural invariance criterion.Jeremy Attard - manuscript
    In the social sciences, within the explanatory paradigm of structural individualism, a theory of action – like rational choice theory – models how individuals behave and interact at the micro level in order to explain macro observations as the aggregation of these individuals actions. A central epistemological issue is that such theoretical models are stuck in a dilemma between falsity of their basic assumptions and triviality of their explanation. On the one hand, models which have a great empirical success (...)
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  38. Viewing-as explanations and ontic dependence.William D’Alessandro - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (3):769-792.
    According to a widespread view in metaphysics and philosophy of science, all explanations involve relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I argue that a family of mathematical cases, which I call “viewing-as explanations”, are incompatible with the Dependence Thesis. These cases, I claim, feature genuine explanations that aren’t supported by ontic dependence relations. Hence the thesis isn’t true in general. The first part of the paper defends this claim (...)
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  39. (2 other versions)The explanation game: a formal framework for interpretable machine learning.David S. Watson & Luciano Floridi - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):1–⁠32.
    We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore (...)
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  40. Mathematical Explanation by Law.Sam Baron - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):683-717.
    Call an explanation in which a non-mathematical fact is explained—in part or in whole—by mathematical facts: an extra-mathematical explanation. Such explanations have attracted a great deal of interest recently in arguments over mathematical realism. In this article, a theory of extra-mathematical explanation is developed. The theory is modelled on a deductive-nomological theory of scientific explanation. A basic DN account of extra-mathematical explanation is proposed and then redeveloped in the light of two difficulties that the basic theory faces. The final view (...)
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  41.  79
    The Use of Supernatural Entities in Moral Conversations as a Cultural-Psychological Attractor.Tamás Tófalvy & Hugo Viciana - 2009 - Proceedings of the New York Academy of Sciences 1167 (1):230-240.
    Social behavior in most human societies is characterized by the following of moral rules explicitly justified by religious belief systems. These systems constitute the diverse domain of human sacred values. Supernatural entities as founders or warranty of moral principles may be seen as a form of “conversation stoppers,” considerations that can be dropped into a moral decision process in order to prevent endlessly reconsidering and endlessly asking for further justification. In this article we offer a general naturalistic framework toward answering (...)
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  42. Is there a plausible realist theory of fictional characters?Andrew Wynn Owen - 2024 - Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 30:850-858.
    The debate between realists and anti-realists about fictional entities is important partly because it connects with debates about the nature of reference. According to the descriptivist model held by Fregeans, a name has reference to an object due to the connection of that name with a description, which is met by the relevant object. According to the causal-communicative model held by Millians, a name refers in virtue of a chain of reference linking that name to a referent. In the case (...)
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  43. The Supercomplexity Puzzle.Nadisha-Marie Aliman - manuscript
    In the deepfake era, materialism and idealism seem to clash at multiple epistemic levels with new additional facets unfolding – an epistemic friction which could act as creativity-stimulating impetus for science and philosophy. Could the information-related concept of supercomplexity be instrumental in better clarifying understudied aspects of the apparent dichotomy? Instead of directly answering this question, this short autodidactic paper compactly analyzes a small but potentially relevant puzzle piece to complexity research taking the form of an explanatory bridge from (...)
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  44. Darwinize It Two Times: On the Possibilities of Extending Evolutionary Medicine Through New Developments in Evolutionary Theory.Ozan Altan Altinok - 2022 - Azimuth 19 (1):197 - 210.
    In this paper, I will briefly summarize the history and current accounts of Evolutionary Medicine (EM). I will show that EM, in its current forms, is using an evolutionary understanding that carries the explanatory framework, as well as explanatory limits, of the Modern Synthesis (MS). I will then point out some essential elements that need to be seen as limiting factors within EM and analyze the limitations that are brought about by the MS understanding of it. On this (...)
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  45. A Aristotle’s Theory of Scientific Demonstration in Posterior Analytics 1.2-9 and 1.13.Davi Bastos - 2020 - Archai: Revista de Estudos Sobre as Origens Do Pensamento Ocidental 30:03021-03021.
    I defend an interpretation of Aristotle’s _Posterior Analytics _Book I which distinguishes between two projects in different passages of that work: to explain what a given science is and to explain what properly scientific knowledge is. I present Aristotle’s theory in answer to ii, with special attention to his definition of scientific knowledge in 71b9-12 and showing how this is developed on chapters 1.2-9 and 1.13 into a solid Theory of Scientific Demonstration. The main point of this theory is that (...)
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  46. HOTT and Heavy: Higher-Order Thought Theory and the Theory-Heavy Approach to Animal Consciousness.Jacob Berger & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2024 - Synthese 203 (98):1-21.
    According to what Birch (2022) calls the theory-heavy approach to investigating nonhuman-animal consciousness, we select one of the well-developed theories of consciousness currently debated within contemporary cognitive science and investigate whether animals exhibit the neural structures or cognitive abilities posited by that theory as sufficient for consciousness. Birch argues, however, that this approach is in general problematic because it faces what he dubs the dilemma of demandingness—roughly, that we cannot use theories that are based on the human case to assess (...)
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  47. Cultural Bias in Explainable AI Research.Uwe Peters & Mary Carman - forthcoming - Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
    For synergistic interactions between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, AI outputs often need to be explainable to people. Explainable AI (XAI) systems are commonly tested in human user studies. However, whether XAI researchers consider potential cultural differences in human explanatory needs remains unexplored. We highlight psychological research that found significant differences in human explanations between many people from Western, commonly individualist countries and people from non-Western, often collectivist countries. We argue that XAI research currently overlooks these variations and (...)
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  48. Intelligent Behaviour.Dimitri Coelho Mollo - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):705-721.
    The notion of intelligence is relevant to several fields of research, including cognitive and comparative psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, among others. However, there is little agreement within and across these fields on how to characterise and explain intelligence. I put forward a behavioural, operational characterisation of intelligence that can play an integrative role in the sciences of intelligence, as well as preserve the distinctive explanatory value of the notion, setting it apart from the related concepts of cognition (...)
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  49. Norm-induced forgetting: When social norms induce us to forget.Marta Caravà - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology:1-23.
    Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused (...)
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  50. Including or excluding free will.Jason D. Runyan - 2024 - In Marilena Streit-Bianchi & Vittorio Gorini, New Frontiers in Science in the Era of AI. Springer Nature. pp. 111-126.
    Antiquated Classical pictures of the universe have been formative in shaping the modern idea that, to the extent change is caused, it is fixed in advance. This idea has played a role in making it seem to many that what we are discovering through science supports the exclusion of free will from models for the relevant neural and bodily changes. I argue that giving up this unwarranted notion about causation opens us to the likelihood that how a person expresses free (...)
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