Teacher To Teacher: Scaffolds for Scientific Explanations

Some dispositions have causal bases or grounding properties. However, ungrounded dispositions do not have causal bases. Ungrounded dispositions are also known as powers, baseless dispositions, and bare dispositions. Ungrounded dispositions are not supplanted by mechanistic explanations, for even mechanistic explanations ultimately reference dispositions. While some argue that citing dispositions does not really explain anything, dispositions can in fact figure in adequate explanations. Furthermore, scientific explanations reference dispositions with no known grounds. This lends some support for the view that ungrounded dispositions are metaphysically possible. Philosophical arguments based on multiple realizability or the demand for truth-makers fail to show that ungrounded dispositions are impossible.

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Because Without Cause

10.1093/oso/9780198777946.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Marc Lange

Keyword(s):

Natural Kinds ◽

Explanatory Power ◽

Scientific Explanations ◽

Physical Necessity ◽

Explanatory Priority ◽

Causal Laws

This chapter investigates non-causal scientific explanations that work by describing how the explanandum involves stronger-than-physical necessity by virtue of certain facts (“constraints”) that possess some variety of necessity stronger than ordinary causal laws possess. In particular, the chapter offers an account of the order of explanatory priority in explanations by constraint. It examines several important examples of explanations by constraint, distinguishing their natural kinds. It gives an account of the sense in which constraints are modally stronger than ordinary causal laws and an account of why certain deductions of constraints exclusively from other constraints possess explanatory power whereas others lack explanatory power.

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Excuse and justification: What’s explanation and understanding got to do with it?

European Journal of Social Theory ◽

10.1177/1368431020986753 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 136843102098675 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Nigel Pleasants

Keyword(s):

Scientific Understanding ◽

Scientific Explanations ◽

Social Scientific ◽

Moral Questions

A well-worn French proverb pronounces ‘ tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ (‘to understand all is to forgive all’). Is forgiveness the inevitable consequence of social scientific understanding of the actions and lives of perpetrators of serious wrongdoing? Do social scientific explanations provide excuses or justifications for the perpetrators of the actions that the explanations purport to explain? In this essay, I seek clarification of these intertwined explanatory and moral questions.

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Lawful Humean explanations are not circular

Synthese ◽

10.1007/s11229-021-03058-y ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Callum Duguid

Keyword(s):

Crucial Role ◽

Scientific Explanation ◽

General Pattern ◽

Central Feature ◽

Scientific Explanations ◽

Absurd Conclusion

AbstractA long-standing charge of circularity against regularity accounts of laws has recently seen a surge of renewed interest. The difficulty is that we appeal to laws to explain their worldly instances, but if these laws are descriptions of regularities in the instances then they are explained by those very instances. By the transitivity of explanation, we reach an absurd conclusion: instances of the laws explain themselves. While drawing a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations merely modifies the challenge rather than resolving it, I argue that it does point us towards an attractive solution. According to Humeanism, the most prominent form of the regularity view, laws capture information about important patterns in the phenomena. By invoking laws in scientific explanations, Humeans are showing how a given explanandum is subsumed into a more general pattern. Doing so both undermines a principle of transitivity that plays a crucial role in the circularity argument and draws out a central feature of the Humean approach to scientific explanation.

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