Abstract
According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena.
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Notes
- 1.
I do not know precisely how to specify the kind of mind-dependence I intend to exclude without also excluding causal interactions involving intentional phenomena that seem to me perfectly legitimate in explanations: that Jill ducked because she saw the looming object. Nor do I intend to exclude notions of information fully specified in causal or statistical form, and so independently of human interpretation. Yet perhaps I have said enough to gesture in the direction of a more adequate formulation.
- 2.
The German verb “erklären” is not ambiguous like the English word “explanation.” The verb contains the idea of “making clear,” which automatically suggests the communicative or representational mode.
- 3.
As Ken Aizawa (personal communication) notes, the CL model arguably can accommodate sentences (A)–(D) of Sect. 2.2. If one takes the CL model to equate explanation with rational expectability rather than rational expectation, then one can say that there are explanations to be discovered and explanations so complex that we will never know them.
- 4.
The same point could be made in terms of empirical adequacy rather than truth, should that be preferred. Idealized theories, as I have described them, must be empirically inadequate in some respect; otherwise, there would be no basis for the claim that they contain false assumptions.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Andreas Hütteman, Marie I. Kaiser, Alex Reutlinger, and other members of the philosophy community at the Universtität zu Köln for support and discussion during the writing of this chapter. I also thank Ken Aizawa, Kevin Amidan, Justin Garson, and Jim Tabery for feedback on earlier drafts. This chapter was delivered at Duke University, and I am grateful to Robert Brandon, Andrew Janiak, Karen Neander, Alex Rosenberg, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for helpful comments.
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Craver, C.F. (2014). The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation. In: Kaiser, M.I., Scholz, O.R., Plenge, D., Hüttemann, A. (eds) Explanation in the Special Sciences. Synthese Library, vol 367. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7563-3_2
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