Results for 'Explanatory Salience'

962 found
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  1. Virtue Epistemology and Explanatory Salience.Georgi Gardiner - 2018 - In Heather D. Battaly (ed.), 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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  2. Mathematics and Explanatory Generality: Nothing but Cognitive Salience.Juha Saatsi & Robert Knowles - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1119-1137.
    We demonstrate how real progress can be made in the debate surrounding the enhanced indispensability argument. Drawing on a counterfactual theory of explanation, well-motivated independently of the debate, we provide a novel analysis of ‘explanatory generality’ and how mathematics is involved in its procurement. On our analysis, mathematics’ sole explanatory contribution to the procurement of explanatory generality is to make counterfactual information about physical dependencies easier to grasp and reason with for creatures like us. This gives precise (...)
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  3. Salience and metaphysical explanation.Phil Corkum - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10771-10792.
    Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive to our epistemic situation and so are not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties are distributed over an extension. For example, the property of being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is distributed over a surface. Similar properties have been put to work in a variety of explanatory tasks in recent metaphysics, including: (...)
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  4. Explanatory Pluralism: An Unrewarding Prediction Error for Free Energy Theorists.Matteo Colombo & Cory Wright - 2017 - Brain and Cognition 112:3–12.
    Courtesy of its free energy formulation, the hierarchical predictive processing theory of the brain (PTB) is often claimed to be a grand unifying theory. To test this claim, we examine a central case: activity of mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic (DA) systems. After reviewing the three most prominent hypotheses of DA activity—the anhedonia, incentive salience, and reward prediction error hypotheses—we conclude that the evidence currently vindicates explanatory pluralism. This vindication implies that the grand unifying claims of advocates of PTB are unwarranted. (...)
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  5. What Does the Sensory Apparatus do When There Is Nothing to Perceive? The Salience of Sensory Absence.Katarzyna Kobos - 2017 - Hybris. Internetowy Magazyn Filozoficzny 38:42-57.
    This study aims to bring out the explanatory potential of embodied predictionism versus passive feed-forward model of sensory stimulation in the pursuit of a parsimonious naturalist account of sensation as a salient feature and an end point of conscious experience. Theoretical approaches towards sensory experience are tested against specific scenarios of the absence of observable or palpable qualities including but not limited to the thought-experimental phenomenon of negative synesthesia at the conclusion of the argument. . Predictionism is first explored (...)
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  6. Moral Perception and Phenomenal Contrast.Jr-Jiun Lian - 2023 - Dissertation, National Chung Cheng University Translated by Jr-Jiun Lian.
    This thesis is a defense of (a version of) moral perceptualism. Moral perceptualism (MP), as is generally understood, advocates the bold view that “moral properties can be perceptual content”; its supporters include Audi (2013, 2015), Lord (2018), McNaughton (1988), McBrayer (2010a, 2010b), Cowan (2015), and Werner (2016, 2020b). In support of MP, Werner (2016) bolsters what he calls ‘phenomenal contrast arguments(PCAs)’. According to PCAs, the best explanation for inter-subjective phenomenal contrast between two subjects facing the same moral situation is that (...)
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  7. Special Attention to the Self: a Mechanistic Model of Patient RB’s Lost Feeling of Ownership.Hunter Gentry - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology (1):1-29.
    Patient RB has a peculiar memory impairment wherein he experiences his memories in rich contextual detail, but claims to not own them. His memories do not feel as if they happened to him. In this paper, I provide an explanatory model of RB’s phenomenology, the self-attentional model. I draw upon recent work in neuroscience on self-attentional processing and global workspace models of conscious recollection to show that RB has a self-attentional deficit that inhibits self-bias processes in broadcasting the contents (...)
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  8. Harmful Salience Perspectives.Ella Whiteley - 2022 - In Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. Chapter 11.
    Consider a terrible situation that too many women find themselves in: 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year. Many of these women do not bring their cases to trial. There are multiple reasons that they might not want to testify in the courts. The incredibly low conviction rate is one. Another reason, however, might be that these women do not want the fact that they were raped to become the most salient thing about them. More specifically, (...)
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  9. Salience Principles for Democracy.Susanna Siegel - 2022 - In Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 235-266.
    I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies, and argue that they generate set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories (...)
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  10. The Explanatory Power of the Substance View of Persons.Francis J. Beckwith - 2004 - Christian Bioethics 10 (1):33-54.
    The purpose of this essay is to offer support for the substance view of persons, the philosophical anthropology defended by Patrick Lee in his essay. In order to accomplish this the author presents a brief definition of the substance view; argues that the substance view has more explanatory power in accounting for why we believe that human persons are intrinsically valuable even when they are not functioning as such, why human persons remain identical to themselves over time, and why (...)
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  11. Salience, Imagination, and Moral Luck.Nathan Stout - 2017 - Philosophical Papers 46 (2):297-313.
    One key desideratum of a theory of blame is that it be able to explain why we typically have differing blaming responses in cases involving significant degrees of luck. T.M. Scanlon has proposed a relational account of blame, and he has argued that his account succeeds in this regard and that this success makes his view preferable to reactive attitude accounts of blame. In this paper, I aim to show that Scanlon's view is open to a different kind of luck-based (...)
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  12. Attention, Salience, and the Phenomenology of Visual Experience.Hemdat Lerman - 2022 - In Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 24-49.
    Both introspection and empirical studies suggest that visual attention can affect the phenomenology of our visual experience. However, the exact character of such effects is far from clear. My aim in this chapter is to spell out the main difficulties involved in attempting to achieve a clearer view of these effects, and to make some suggestions as to how we can make progress with this issue while avoiding tempting mistakes. I do this by discussing the question of whether there is (...)
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  13. Order-Based Salience Patterns in Language: What They Are and Why They Matter.Ella Kate Whiteley - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns,’ referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange.’ Despite (...)
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  14. Explanatory Strategies beyond The Individualism/Holism Debate.Jeroen Van Bouwel - 2014 - In Julie Zahle & Finn Collin (eds.), Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Cham: Springer. pp. 105-119.
    Starting from the plurality of explanatory strategies in the actual practice of socialscientists, I introduce a framework for explanatory pluralism – a normative endorsement of the plurality of forms and levels of explanation used by social scientists. Equipped with thisframework, central issues in the individualism/holism debate are revisited, namely emergence,reduction and the idea of microfoundations. Discussing these issues, we notice that in recentcontributions the focus has been shifting towards relationism, pluralism and interaction, awayfrom dichotomous individualism/holism thinking and a (...)
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  15. Salience reasoning in coordination games.Julius Schönherr - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6601-6620.
    Salience reasoning, many have argued, can help solve coordination problems, but only if such reasoning is supplemented by higher-order predictions, e.g. beliefs about what others believe yet others will choose. In this paper, I will argue that this line of reasoning is self-undermining. Higher-order behavioral predictions defeat salience-based behavioral predictions. To anchor my argument in the philosophical literature, I will develop it in response and opposition to the popular Lewisian model of salience reasoning in coordination games. This (...)
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  16. Silence & Salience: On Being Judgmental.Neal Tognazzini - 2020 - In Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 256-269.
    This chapter explores the concept of judgmentalism: what it is and why it’s morally problematic. After criticizing an account offered by Gary Watson, the paper argues for a broader understanding of what it is to be judgmental, encompassing not just the overall beliefs that we form about someone else, but also the very pattern of our thoughts about those with whom we are involved in interpersonal relationships. The thesis is that to care about someone is to be oriented toward them, (...)
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  17. Explanatory Domains and Reciprocal Causation: How (not) integrate development and evolution.Tiago Rama - manuscript
    A common explanatory error in science concerns the conflation of the epistemological roles between two domains. Here we will address a specific case: when explanations of development replace evolutionary explanations or vice versa. Ernst Mayr famously distinguished between proximate and ultimate causal explanations in biology. His view was central to the Modern Synthesis’ exclusion of development from evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, the explanatory role of developmental processes in evolution is a central theme in current theoretical biology which has prompted (...)
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  18. Lingering stereotypes: Salience bias in philosophical argument.Eugen Fischer & Paul E. Engelhardt - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (4):415-439.
    Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...)
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  19. Explanatory Challenges in Metaethics.Joshua Schechter - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 443-459.
    There are several important arguments in metaethics that rely on explanatory considerations. Gilbert Harman has presented a challenge to the existence of moral facts that depends on the claim that the best explanation of our moral beliefs does not involve moral facts. The Reliability Challenge against moral realism depends on the claim that moral realism is incompatible with there being a satisfying explanation of our reliability about moral truths. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these and related (...)
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  20. Explanatory exclusion and mental explanation.Dwayne Moore - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (3):390-404.
    Jaegwon Kim once refrained from excluding distinct mental causes of effects that depend upon the sufficient physical cause of the effect. At that time, Kim also refrained from excluding distinct mental explanations of effects that depend upon complete physical explanations of the effect. More recently, he has excluded distinct mental causes of effects that depend upon the sufficient cause of the effect, since the physical cause is individually sufficient for the effect. But there has been, to this point, no parallel (...)
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  21. Explanatory Depth.Brad Weslake - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (2):273-294.
    I defend an account of explanatory depth according to which explanations in the non-fundamental sciences can be deeper than explanations in fundamental physics.
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  22. Salience and Epistemic Egocentrism: An Empirical Study.Joshua Alexander, Chad Gonnerman & John Waterman - 2014 - In James R. Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 97-117.
    Jennifer Nagel (2010) has recently proposed a fascinating account of the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge in conversational contexts in which unrealized possibilities of error have been mentioned. Her account appeals to epistemic egocentrism, or what is sometimes called the curse of knowledge, an egocentric bias to attribute our own mental states to other people (and sometimes our own future and past selves). Our aim in this paper is to investigate the empirical merits of Nagel’s hypothesis about the psychology involved (...)
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  23. 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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  24. Explanatory Abstraction and the Goldilocks Problem: Interventionism Gets Things Just Right.Thomas Blanchard - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2):633-663.
    Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explanation, namely identifying possible interventions that would have changed the explanandum.
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  25. Is Explanatoriness a Guide to Confirmation? A Reply to Climenhaga.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2017 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (4):581-590.
    We argued that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in the following sense: Let H be a hypothesis, O an observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then our claim is that Pr = Pr. We defended this screening-off thesis by discussing an example concerning smoking and cancer. Climenhaga argues that SOT is mistaken because it delivers the wrong verdict about a slightly different smoking-and-cancer case. He also considers a variant of SOT, called (...)
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  26. Explanatory Consolidation: From ‘Best’ to ‘Good Enough’.Finnur Dellsén - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):157-177.
    In science and everyday life, we often infer that something is true because it would explain some set of facts better than any other hypothesis we can think of. But what if we have reason to believe that there is a better way to explain these facts that we just haven't thought of? Wouldn't that undermine our warrant for believing the best available explanation? Many philosophers have assumed that we can solve such underconsideration problems by stipulating that a hypothesis should (...)
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  27. Naturalizing Natural Salience.Jacob VanDrunen & Daniel Herrmann - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Grice, Lewis, and Skyrms proposed similar distinctions between kinds of meaning. The meaning of terms in human language, as Lewis and Skyrms had it, is ‘conventional’. Skyrms presented models showing how it is possible for conventional meaning to evolve in a population without reliance on pre-existing meaning. But one might think of conventionality as coming in degrees, based on whether the evolutionary process begins with ‘natural saliences’. We propose a theory of natural salience and several extensions of Skyrms’s models (...)
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  28. Moods and the Salience of Subjectivity.Anna Giustina - forthcoming - In Maik Niemeck & Stefan Lang (eds.), Self and Affect: Philosophical Intersections. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
    The philosophical debate around the nature of moods has mostly focused on their apparent undirectedness: unlike mental states such as perceptual experiences, thoughts, and emotions, moods do not seem to be directed at any specific object, and indeed they do not seem to be directed at anything at all. In this paper, I want to draw attention to a different feature of moods, one that is as important and in need of explanation as their apparent undirectedness, but which has been (...)
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  29. Metaphysically explanatory unification.David Mark Kovacs - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1659-1683.
    This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting consequences. The view offers a novel (...)
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  30. Grounding Functionalism and Explanatory Unificationism.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (4):799-819.
    In this essay, I propose a functionalist theory of grounding (functionalist-grounding). Specifically, I argue that grounding is a second-order phenomenon that is realized by relations that play the noncausal explanatoriness role. I also show that functionalist-grounding can deal with a powerful challenge. Appeals to explanatory unificationism have been made to argue that the success of noncausal explanations does not depend on the existence of grounding relations. Against this, I argue that a systematization involving functionalist-grounding is superior to its anti-relational (...)
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  31. Explanatory Abstractions.Lina Jansson & Juha Saatsi - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):817–844.
    A number of philosophers have recently suggested that some abstract, plausibly non-causal and/or mathematical, explanations explain in a way that is radically dif- ferent from the way causal explanation explain. Namely, while causal explanations explain by providing information about causal dependence, allegedly some abstract explanations explain in a way tied to the independence of the explanandum from the microdetails, or causal laws, for example. We oppose this recent trend to regard abstractions as explanatory in some sui generis way, and (...)
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  32. Explanatory Pluralism and The Heuristic Identity Theory.Robert N. McCauley & William Bechtel - 2001 - Theory & Psychology 11 (6):736–760.
    Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies, which microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and which antireductionists fear, offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed the alleged economies that interlevel connections (including identities) justify while overlooking their fundamental role in promoting scientific research. A brief review of research on visual processing provides support for the (...)
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  33. (1 other version)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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  34. Explanatory Coherence and the Impossibility of Confirmation by Coherence.Ted Poston - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):835-848.
    The coherence of independent reports provides a strong reason to believe that the reports are true. This plausible claim has come under attack from recent work in Bayesian epistemology. This work shows that, under certain probabilistic conditions, coherence cannot increase the probability of the target claim. These theorems are taken to demonstrate that epistemic coherentism is untenable. To date no one has investigated how these results bear on different conceptions of coherence. I investigate this situation using Thagard’s ECHO model of (...)
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  35. 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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  36. Explanatory Pluralism in Normative Ethics.Pekka Väyrynen - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.
    Some theorists of normative explanation argue that we can make sense of debates between first-order moral theories such as consequentialism and its rivals only if we understand their explanations of why the right acts are right and the wrong acts are wrong as generative (e.g. grounding) explanations. Others argue that the standard form of normative explanation is, instead, some kind of unification. Neither sort of explanatory monism can account for all the explanations of particular moral facts that moral theorists (...)
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  37. Explanatory Indispensability and Deliberative Indispensability: Against Enoch's Analogy.Alex Worsnip - 2016 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (4):226-235.
    In this note, I discuss David Enoch's influential deliberative indispensability argument for metanormative realism, and contend that the argument fails. In doing so, I uncover an important disanalogy between explanatory indispensability arguments and deliberative indispensability arguments, one that explains how we could accept the former without accepting the latter.
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  38. Epistemic Foundations of Salience-Based Coordination.Vojtěch Zachník - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 4 (28):819-844.
    This paper aims to assess current theoretical findings on the origin of coordination by salience and suggests a way to clarify the existing framework. The main concern is to reveal how different coordination mechanisms rely on specific epistemic aspects of reasoning. The paper highlights the fact that basic epistemic assumptions of theories diverge in a way that makes them essentially distinctive. Consequently, recommendations and predictions of the traditional views of coordination by salience are, in principle, based on the (...)
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  39. 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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  40. 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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  41. Against the Explanatory Argument for Enactivism.Leonard Dung - 2022 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (7-8):57-68.
    Sensorimotor enactivism is the view that the content and the sensory modality of perceptual experience are determined by implicit knowledge of lawful regularities between bodily movements and patterns of sensory stimulation. A proponent of the explanatory argument for sensorimotor enactivism holds that this view is able to provide an intelligible explanation for why certain material realizers give rise to certain perceptual experiences, while rival accounts cannot close this “explanatory gap”. However, I argue that the notion of the “material (...)
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  42. Explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant, or inference to the best explanation meets Bayesian confirmation theory.W. Roche & E. Sober - 2013 - Analysis 73 (4):659-668.
    In the world of philosophy of science, the dominant theory of confirmation is Bayesian. In the wider philosophical world, the idea of inference to the best explanation exerts a considerable influence. Here we place the two worlds in collision, using Bayesian confirmation theory to argue that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant.
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  43. The Explanatory Role of Umwelt in Evolutionary Theory: Introducing von Baer's Reflections on Teleological Development.Tiago Rama - 2024 - Biosemiotics 1:1-26.
    Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components (...)
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  44. The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson & Karl Persson - 2012 - Noûs 46 (2):326-354.
    In this paper, we do three things. First, we put forth a novel hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory judgments. Second, we argue that this hypothesis explains both some general features of everyday thinking about responsibility and the appeal of skeptical arguments against moral responsibility. Finally, we argue that, if correct, the hypothesis provides a defense against these skeptical arguments.
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  45. Purely Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power: A Critique.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):129-149.
    All extant purely probabilistic measures of explanatory power satisfy the following technical condition: if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ∼H1) < Pr(E | ∼H2), then H1’s explanatory power with respect to E is greater than H2’s explanatory power with respect to E. We argue that any measure satisfying this condition faces three serious problems—the Problem of Temporal Shallowness, the Problem of Negative Causal Interactions, and the Problem of Nonexplanations. We further argue that (...)
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  46. 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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  47. On the role of explanatory and systematic power in scientific reasoning.Peter Brössel - 2015 - Synthese 192 (12):3877-3913.
    The paper investigates measures of explanatory power and how to define the inference schema “Inference to the Best Explanation”. It argues that these measures can also be used to quantify the systematic power of a hypothesis and the inference schema “Inference to the Best Systematization” is defined. It demonstrates that systematic power is a fruitful criterion for theory choice and IBS is truth-conducive. It also shows that even radical Bayesians must admit that systemic power is an integral component of (...)
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  48. The Explanatory Merits of Reasons-First Epistemology.Eva Schmidt - 2020 - In Christoph Demmerling & Dirk Schröder (eds.), Concepts in Thought, Action, and Emotion: New Essays. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 75-91.
    I present an explanatory argument for the reasons-first view: It is superior to knowledge-first views in particular in that it can both explain the specific epistemic role of perception and account for the shape and extent of epistemic justification.
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  49.  30
    Moral Generalizations and Moral Explanatory Pluralism.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2024 - Acta Analytica:1-20.
    I argue that moral principles, construed as moral generalizations, can be genuinely explanatory. Specifically, I present and respond to a challenge according to which moral generalizations are explanatorily redundant. In response, I present and defend an explanatory dimension of moral generalizations that is based on the idea of unification. I do so in the context of motivating a realist-friendly moral explanatory pluralism (i.e., the view that there can be many, equally legitimate, explanations of moral facts). Finally, I (...)
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  50. Explanatory independence and epistemic interdependence: A case study of the optimality approach.Angela Potochnik - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (1):213-233.
    The value of optimality modeling has long been a source of contention amongst population biologists. Here I present a view of the optimality approach as at once playing a crucial explanatory role and yet also depending on external sources of confirmation. Optimality models are not alone in facing this tension between their explanatory value and their dependence on other approaches; I suspect that the scenario is quite common in science. This investigation of the optimality approach thus serves as (...)
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