Articles liés à Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation

Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation - Couverture souple

Strevens

 
9780674062573: Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0674062574 ISBN 13 : 9780674062573
Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2011

Synopsis

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.

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À propos de l'auteur

Michael Strevens is Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Harvard University Press
Date d'édition
2011
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0674062574
ISBN 13 
9780674062573
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
536
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
Amazon EU Sarl
0
www.amazon.com

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Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780674031838: Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  0674031830 ISBN 13 :  9780674031838
Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2009
Couverture rigide