Teleological explanation: A species of causal explanation

1988 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Lynn Holt
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Teleological Explanation

Resuming Discussion of the Common Cause of Animal Self-Motion: How Does the Soul Move the Body?

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-344
Author(s):  
Klaus Corcilius
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
The Body ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Teleological Explanation ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
Technical Vocabulary ◽  
The Common ◽  
Self Motion

This contribution comments on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium 6 (MA 6). In this chapter Aristotle resumes the discussion of the common cause of animal self-motion. For this purpose the chapter introduces the technical vocabulary from De Anima III 9–11, e.g. desire, phantasia, nous, perception. The contribution argues, among other things, that MA 6 marks the beginning, not of Aristotle’s teleological explanation of animal motion, but of his common causal explanation of animal self-motion in the sense of the efficient cause common to all sublunary living beings capable of moving themselves locally.

scholarly journals Consequentialist Reasons for Some Education Reforms

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Zdenko Kodelja
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
Education Reforms ◽  
Teleological Explanation ◽  
Social Reforms ◽  
Practical Syllogism ◽  
Instrumental Values ◽  
Creativity And Innovation

The reasons for education reforms – as a particular form of social reforms – are either consequentialist or non-consequentialist. However, the reasons for the education reforms that are briefly discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of education in the present paper are above all consequentialist. These are the reasons for proposed education reforms in EU countries whose strategic aim is equated with the enhancement of two values: creativity and innovation. It is supposed that these education reforms will have good effects and not that they are good in and of themselves. Therefore, although creativity and innovation might be seen as having intrinsic value, they are – in these education reforms – treated predominantly as instrumental values. It seems that the introduction of such education reforms can be understood as a decision founded not on causal explanation, but rather on the basis of a special type of teleological explanation, which has the logical form of a “practical syllogism”. In this case, the occurrence of an action is explained in terms of the goals and purposes of the agent; it shows that the agent did what s/he did because s/he tried to achieve a certain goal and believed that certain means were necessary or sufficient for achieving this goal.

Probability and Explanation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Healey
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Quantum State ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Born Rule ◽  
Correct Application

We can use quantum theory to explain an enormous variety of phenomena by showing why they were to be expected and what they depend on. These explanations of probabilistic phenomena involve applications of the Born rule: to accept quantum theory is to let relevant Born probabilities guide one’s credences about presently inaccessible events. We use quantum theory to explain a probabilistic phenomenon by showing how its probabilities follow from a correct application of the Born rule, thereby exhibiting the phenomenon’s dependence on the quantum state to be assigned in circumstances of that type. This is not a causal explanation since a probabilistic phenomenon is not constituted by events that may manifest it: but each of those events does depend causally on events that actually occur in those circumstances. Born probabilities are objective and sui generis, but not all Born probabilities are chances.

scholarly journals Beyond Causal Explanation: Einstein’s Principle Not Reichenbach’s

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Michael Silberstein ◽  
William Mark Stuckey ◽  
Timothy McDevitt
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Quantum Information ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Minkowski Spacetime ◽  
Physical Principle ◽  
Causal Principle ◽  
Complete Rejection ◽  
Epr Correlations ◽  
Tsirelson Bound

Our account provides a local, realist and fully non-causal principle explanation for EPR correlations, contextuality, no-signalling, and the Tsirelson bound. Indeed, the account herein is fully consistent with the causal structure of Minkowski spacetime. We argue that retrocausal accounts of quantum mechanics are problematic precisely because they do not fully transcend the assumption that causal or constructive explanation must always be fundamental. Unlike retrocausal accounts, our principle explanation is a complete rejection of Reichenbach’s Principle. Furthermore, we will argue that the basis for our principle account of quantum mechanics is the physical principle sought by quantum information theorists for their reconstructions of quantum mechanics. Finally, we explain why our account is both fully realist and psi-epistemic.

scholarly journals Philosophy as Synchronic History

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
DANIEL STOLJAR
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Philosophical Progress ◽  
The Way

Abstract Bernard Williams argues that philosophy is in some deep way akin to history. This article is a novel exploration and defense of the Williams thesis (as I call it)—though in a way anathema to Williams himself. The key idea is to apply a central moral from what is sometimes called the analytic philosophy of history of the 1960s to the philosophy of philosophy of today, namely, the separation of explanation and laws. I suggest that an account of causal explanation offered by David Lewis may be modified to bring out the way in which this moral applies to philosophy, and so to defend the Williams thesis. I discuss in detail the consequences of the thesis for the issue of philosophical progress and note also several further implications: for the larger context of contemporary metaphilosophy, for the relation of philosophy to other subjects, and for explaining, or explaining away, the belief that success in philosophy requires a field-specific ability or brilliance.

scholarly journals The Inflation Technique Completely Solves the Causal Compatibility Problem

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Navascués ◽  
Elie Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Linear Programming ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Categorical Variables ◽  
False Negatives ◽  
The Given ◽  
Causal Structures ◽  
Compatibility Question ◽  
Structure Graph

AbstractThe causal compatibility question asks whether a given causal structure graph — possibly involving latent variables — constitutes a genuinely plausible causal explanation for a given probability distribution over the graph’s observed categorical variables. Algorithms predicated on merely necessary constraints for causal compatibility typically suffer from false negatives, i.e. they admit incompatible distributions as apparently compatible with the given graph. In 10.1515/jci-2017-0020, one of us introduced the inflation technique for formulating useful relaxations of the causal compatibility problem in terms of linear programming. In this work, we develop a formal hierarchy of such causal compatibility relaxations. We prove that inflation is asymptotically tight, i.e., that the hierarchy converges to a zero-error test for causal compatibility. In this sense, the inflation technique fulfills a longstanding desideratum in the field of causal inference. We quantify the rate of convergence by showing that any distribution which passes the nth-order inflation test must be $\begin{array}{} \displaystyle {O}{\left(n^{{{-}{1}}/{2}}\right)} \end{array}$-close in Euclidean norm to some distribution genuinely compatible with the given causal structure. Furthermore, we show that for many causal structures, the (unrelaxed) causal compatibility problem is faithfully formulated already by either the first or second order inflation test.

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