Explanatory Relevance and Contrastive Explanation

2018 ◽  
Vol 85 (5) ◽  
pp. 806-818
Author(s):  
Christopher Pincock
Keyword(s):  
Contrastive Explanation ◽  
Explanatory Relevance

How Content Explains

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Shea
Keyword(s):  
Research Programme ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Content Determination ◽  
Explanatory Relevance ◽  
Tight Connection ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
Naturalistic Account ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Semantic Properties

The varitel accounts of content allow us to see how the practice of representational explanation works and why content has an explanatory role to play. They establish the causal-explanatory relevance of semantic properties and are neutral about causal efficacy. Exploitable relations give the accounts an advantage over views based only on outputs. Content does valuable explanatory work in areas beyond psychology, but it need not be explanatorily valuable in every case. The varitel accounts illuminate why there should be a tight connection between content and the circumstances in which a representation develops. The accounts have some epistemological consequences. Representations at the personal level are different in a variety of ways that are relevant to content determination. Naturalizing personal-level content thus becomes a tractable research programme. Most importantly, varitel semantics offers a naturalistic account of the content of representations in the brain and other subpersonal representational systems.

scholarly journals Silent and a audible stereotypes: The constitution of "ethnic character" in Serbian epic poetry

2005 ◽  
pp. 105-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordana Djeric
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Mental Image ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
National Character ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relevant Feature ◽  
Explanatory Relevance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Epic Poems

The article deals with the explanatory relevance of the concept of stereotype in one of its original meanings - as a "mental image". This meaning of the term is the starting point for further differentiations, such as: between linguistic and behavioral stereotypes (in the sense of nonverbal, expected responses); universal and particular stereotypes; self representative and introspective stereotypes; permanent and contemporary stereotypes; and finally, what is most important for our purposes, the difference between silent and audible stereotypes. These distinctions, along with the functions of stereotype, are discussed in the first part of the paper. In the second part, the relations of silent and audible stereotypes are tested against the introduction of "innovative vocabularies" in popular lore. In other words, the explanatory power of this differentiation is checked through an analysis of unconventional motives in Serbian epic poems. The goal of the argument is to clarify the procedure of self creation of masculinity as a relevant feature of the "national character" through "tactic games" of silent and audible stereotypes. The examination of these "poetic strategies" serves a twofold purpose: to illustrate the process of constructing particular features of the "ethno type", on one hand, and to check hypotheses and models which are taken as frameworks in analyzing stereotypes, on the other.

Contrastive Explanation and Causal Triangulation

1991 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 687-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lipton
Keyword(s):  
Contrastive Explanation

Supervenience and Reduction in Biological Hierarchies

1988 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 209-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Collier
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Biological Theory ◽  
Biological Systems ◽  
Reductive Explanation ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Explanatory Relevance

Supervenience is a relationship which has been used recently to explain the physical determination of biological phenomena despite resistance to reduction (Rosenberg, 1978, 1985; Sober, 1984a). Supervenience, however, is plagued by ambiguities which weaken its explanatory value and obscure some interesting aspects of reduction in biology. Although I suspect that similar considerations affect the use of supervenience in ethics and the philosophy of mind, I don’t intend anything I have to say here to apply outside of the physical and biological cases I consider.The main point of this paper is that there is a property of biological systems which makes it both misleading and inappropriate to reduce central biological phenomena to the properties of underlying components. Despite this, reductive explanation has been a major source of innovation in biological theory. The apparent tension can be resolved if underlying properties are explanatorily relevant to the higher level phenomena even though the latter are not strictly reducible to the former. Supervenience, I will argue, is not robust enough to deny reduction while supporting explanatory relevance.

Explaining cross-regional policy variation in public sector reform: Institutions and change actors in the health sector in Spain

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Gallego ◽  
Nicolás Barbieri ◽  
Sheila González
Keyword(s):  
Policy Change ◽  
Public Management ◽  
Regional Policy ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Management Reform ◽  
Organizational Settings ◽  
Explanatory Relevance ◽  
Key Variables ◽  
Policy Variation

How can we explain cross-regional policy variation? That is, how can we understand different policy outcomes within similar institutional and organizational settings? Scholars have recently reflected on the new institutionalist explanatory pitfall involved in assuming a causality link between institutional factors and policy outcomes and argue that such link needs to rely on evidence from policy variables. On this line, recent contributions have built a causal model that links types of institutional change to types of actors' roles and strategies, within particular contextual and organizational scenarios that favor or hinder their emergence. This paper pursues this explanatory interest by applying this model to the analysis of how decision-making by two regional governments in Spain has led to different institutional and policy change outcomes in the same policy sector, namely, public management reform in healthcare. This study confirms the explanatory relevance of the model's key variables, but provides evidence of how some of them may be reinterpreted to provide a dynamic explanation of their influence on the process and outcome of institutional and policy change.

Skepticism and Contrastive Explanation

Noûs ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Rieber
Keyword(s):  
Contrastive Explanation

Jaspers, phenomenology, and the ‘ontological difference’

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis A. Sass
Keyword(s):  
General Position ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Ontological Difference ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Explanatory Relevance

This paper considers Karl Jaspers’ general position regarding human experience and the study thereof—as expressed in “The Phenomenological Approach in Psychopathology” (1912) and General Psychopathology (first published 1913). After describing Jaspers’ rejection of epistemological objectivism and physicalism, I consider later developments in hermeneutic phenomenology that are absent from his discussion. These include criticism of the “prejudice against prejudices” and also of what Heidegger termed the “forgetting of the ontological difference” (namely, neglect of general qualities of the experiential world and its presencing, in favour of focusing on entity-like phenomena that occur ‘within’ the horizons of this awareness). Jaspers presents phenomenology as a form of pure description, devoid of explanatory relevance, that offers “unprejudiced direct grasp of [experiential] events as they really are.” From a contemporary, hermeneutic standpoint, Jaspers’ vision seems overly modest regarding what phenomenology can offer to psychopathology, yet overly confident about the precision and certitude of the accounts it might provide.

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