Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation

Description

What does it mean for scientists to truly understand, rather than to merely describe, how the world works? Michael Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientific explanation and understanding that overhauls and augments the familiar causal approach to explanation. What is replaced is the test for explanatorily relevant causal information: Strevens discards the usual criterion of counterfactual dependence in favor of a criterion that turns on a process of progressive abstraction away from a fully detailed, physical causal story. The augmentations include the introduction of a new, non-causal explanatory relevance relation—entanglement—and an independent theory of the role of black-boxing and functional specification in explanation. The abstraction-centered notion of difference-making leads to a rich causal treatment of many aspects of explanation that have been either ignored or handled inadequately by earlier causal approaches, including the explanation of laws and other regularities, with particular attention to the explanation of physically contingent high-level laws, idealization in explanation, and probabilistic explanation in deterministic systems, as in statistical physics, evolutionary biology, and medicine. The result is an account of explanation that has especially significant consequences for the higher-level sciences: biology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences. Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents List of Figures and Table Preface Part I. The Causal Approach to Explanation Chapter 1. Approaches to Explanation 1.1. Causal Explanation and Explanatory Relevance 1.2. Preliminaries 1.3. Accounts of the Explanatory Relation 1.4. The Causal Element in Explanation 1.5. The Pursuit of Explanation Chapter 2. Causal and Explanatory Relevance 2.1. The Minimal Causal Account of Event Explanation 2.2. The Problem of Relevance 2.3. The Probabilistic Solution 2.4. The Counterfactual Solution 2.5. The Manipulationist Solution Part II. The Kairetic Account of Explanation Chapter 3. The Kairetic Account of Difference-Making 3.1. Overview of the Kairetic Account 3.2. Causal Models 3.3. States of Affairs 3.4. The Eliminative Procedure 3.5. Abstraction and Optimizing 3.6. Cohesion 3.7. The Optimizing Procedure 3.8. Rival Accounts of Difference-Making Reconsidered Chapter 4. The Kairetic Account of Explanation 4.1. Standalone Explanation 4.2. Difference-Making and Transitivity in Compound Explanations 4.3. Comparing Standalone Explanations 4.4. Laplacean Blindness Chapter 5. Extending the Kairetic Account 5.1. Quantifying Explanatory Relevance 5.2. Trading Off Accuracy for Generality 5.3. The Explanatory Framework 5.4. Black Boxes, Functional Properties, and Multiple Realizability 5.5. Aggregative Explanation 5.6. Contrastive Explanation 5.7. Beyond Causal Explanation Chapter 6. Event Explanation and Causal Claims 6.1. Background Conditions versus Causes 6.2. Preemption 6.3. Nonevents as Difference-Makers 6.4. Nonevents as Explananda 6.5. Transitivity 6.6. Three Kinds of Causation Part III. Explanation of Laws and Regularities Chapter 7. Regularity Explanation 7.1. Approaches to Regularity Explanation 7.2. Explaining Laws with Mechanisms 7.3. Basing Generalizations 7.4. Property Laws 7.5. Other Laws 7.6. The Metaphysics of High and Low Chapter 8. Abstraction in Regularity Explanation 8.1. Problems of Abstraction in Regularity Explanation 8.2. Explaining Boyle’s Law 8.3. A Theory of Idealization 8.4. Mathematically Driven Explanation Part IV. Probabilistic Explanation Chapter 9. Approaches to Probabilistic Explanation 9.1. Explanatory Questions 9.2. Varieties of Probabilistic Explanation: Examples 9.3. Varieties of Probabilistic Explanation: Commentary 9.4. Accounts of Probabilistic Explanation 9.5. Elitism versus Egalitarianism 9.6. Probability and Determinism 9.7. Formal Elements of the Kairetic Approach Chapter 10. Kairetic Explanation of Frequencies 10.1. Probabilistic Explanation in Deterministic Systems 10.2. Explanation with Complex Probability 10.3. Explanation with Quasiprobability 10.4. Elitism versus Egalitarianism the Kairetic Way 10.5. Regularity Explanation and Probabilistic Metaphysics Chapter 11. Kairetic Explanation of Single Outcomes 11.1. Single-Outcome Explanation 11.2. Robustness 11.3. Nonexplanatory Probability-Raisers 11.4. Nonexplanatory Critical Events 11.5. Elitism and Egalitarianism Revisited Part V. Valediction Chapter 12. Looking Outward 12.1. Biology: Probabilistic Explanation 12.2. Psychology: Content and Explanation 12.3. Economics: Abstraction 12.4. Explanatory Autonomy Chapter 13. Looking Inward Notes References Index