Narrative possibility and narrative explanation

Narratives are about not only what actually happened, but also what might have. And narrative explanations make productive use of these unrealized possibilities. I discuss narrative explanation as a form of counterfactual, difference-making explanation, with a demanding qualification: the counterfactual conditions are historically or narratively (not merely logically or physically) possible. I consider these issues in connection with literary, historical and scientific narratives.     

No understanding without explanation

Scientific understanding, this paper argues, can be analyzed entirely in terms of a mental act of “grasping” and a notion of explanation. To understand why a phenomenon occurs is to grasp a correct explanation of the phenomenon. To understand a scientific theory is to be able to construct, or at least to grasp, a range of potential explanations in which that theory accounts for other phenomena. There is no route to scientific understanding, then, that does not go by way of scientific explanation.     

Anachronism and retrospective explanation: in defence of a present-centred history of science

This paper defends the right of historians to make use of their knowledge of the remote consequences of past actions. In particular, it is argued that the disciplinary cohesion of the history of science relies crucially upon our ability to target, for further investigation, those past activities ancestral to modern science. The history of science is not limited to the study of those activities but it is structured around them. In this sense, the discipline is inherently ‘present-centred’: its boundaries are determined, in part, by judgements inaccessible to the historical actors. Present-centredness of this sort, it is urged, should not be regarded as a problem; its methodological consequences are minimal.     

Collaborative explanation and biological mechanisms

This paper motivates and outlines a new account of scientific explanation, which I term ‘collaborative explanation.’ My approach is pluralist: I do not claim that all scientific explanations are collaborative, but only that some important scientific explanations are—notably those of complex organic processes like development. Collaborative explanation is closely related to what philosophers of biology term ‘mechanistic explanation’ (e.g., Machamer et al., Craver, 2007). I begin with minimal conditions for mechanisms: complexity, causality, and multilevel structure. Different accounts of mechanistic explanation interpret and prioritize these conditions in different ways. This framework reveals two distinct varieties of mechanistic explanation: causal and constitutive. The two have heretofore been conflated, with philosophical discussion focusing on the former. This paper addresses the imbalance, using a case study of modeling practices in Systems Biology to reveals key features of constitutive mechanistic explanation. I then propose an analysis of this variety of mechanistic explanation, in terms of collaborative concepts, and sketch the outlines of a general theory of collaborative explanation. I conclude with some reflections on the connection between this variety of explanation and social aspects of scientific practice.     

The ontic conception of scientific explanation

Wesley Salmon's version of the ontic conception of explanation is a main historical root of contemporary work on mechanistic explanation. This paper examines and critiques the philosophical merits of Salmon's version, and argues that his conception's most fundamental construct is either fundamentally obscure, or else reduces to a non-ontic conception of explanation. Either way, the ontic conception is a misconception.     

A pragmatic account of mechanistic artifact explanation

A mechanistic artifact explanation is an explanation that accounts for an artifact behavior by describing the underlying mechanism. The article shows that there are different kinds of mechanistic artifact explanation: top-down and bottom-up explanation, and I also distinguish between less and more inclusive top-down explanations. To illustrate these different kinds of explanation, the behavior of a simple, fictional artifact is explained in different ways. I defend that which explanation is ideal, depends on pragmatic factors (e.g., the background knowledge of the explainee and the specific goal for which the explanation will be used). For each kind of explanation, the situations, goals and interests for which it is most appropriate are specified, resulting in a pragmatic theory of mechanistic artifact explanation. This theory is compared to Jeroen de Ridder’s account of the pragmatics of mechanistic artifact explanation.     

Mechanistic artefact explanation

One thing about technical artefacts that needs to be explained is how their physical make-up, or structure, enables them to fulfil the behaviour associated with their function, or, more colloquially, how they work. In this paper I develop an account of such explanations based on the familiar notion of mechanistic explanation. To accomplish this, I (1) outline two explanatory strategies that provide two different types of insight into an artefact’s functioning, and (2) show how human action inevitably plays a role in artefact explanation. I then use my own account to criticize other recent work on mechanistic explanation and conclude with some general implications for the philosophy of explanation.     

Narrative ordering and explanation

This paper investigates the important role of narrative in social science case-based research. The focus is on the use of narrative in creating a productive ordering of the materials within such cases, and on how such ordering functions in relation to ‘narrative explanation’. It argues that narrative ordering based on juxtaposition - using an analogy to certain genres of visual representation - is associated with creating and resolving puzzles in the research field. Analysis of several examples shows how the use of conceptual or theoretical resources within the narrative ordering of ingredients enables the narrative explanation of the case to be resituated at other sites, demonstrating how such explanations can attain scope without implying full generality.     

Circularity,indispensability, and mathematical explanation in science

In this paper I consider the objection that the Enhanced Indispensability Argument (EIA) is circular and hence fails to support mathematical platonism. The objection is that the explanandum in any mathematical explanation of a physical phenomenon is itself identified using mathematical concepts. Hence the explanandum is only genuine if the truth of some mathematical theory is already presupposed. I argue that this objection deserves to be taken seriously, that it does sometimes undermine support for EIA, but that there is no reason to think that circularity is an unavoidable feature of mathematical explanation in science.     

Realizability and the varieties of explanation

What realization is has been convincingly presented in relation to the way we determine what counts as the realizers of realized properties. The way we explain a fact of realization includes a reference to what realization should be; therefore it informs in turn our understanding of the nature of realization. Conceptions of explanation are thereby included in the views of realization as a metaphysical property.Recently, several major views of realization such as Polger and Shapiro's or Gillett and Aizawa's, however competing, have relied on the neo-mechanicist theory of explanations (e.g,. Darden and Caver 2013), currently popular among philosophers of science. However, it has also been increasingly argued that some explanations are not mechanistic (e.g., Batterman 2009).Using an account given in Huneman (2017), I argue that within those explanations the fact that some mathematical properties are instantiated is explanatory, and that this defines a specific explanatory type called “structural explanation”, whose subtypes could be: optimality explanations (usually found in economics), topological explanations, etc. This paper thereby argues that all subtypes of structural explanation define several kinds of realizability, which are not equivalent to the usual notion of realization tied to mechanistic explanations, onto which many of the philosophical investigations are focused. Then it draws some consequences concerning the notion of multiple realizability.     

Perspectivism, inconsistent models, and contrastive explanation

It is widely recognized that scientific theories are often associated with strictly inconsistent models, but there is little agreement concerning the epistemic consequences. Some argue that model inconsistency supports a strong perspectivism, according to which claims serving as interpretations of models are inevitably and irreducibly perspectival. Others argue that in at least some cases, inconsistent models can be unified as approximations to a theory with which they are associated, thus undermining this kind of perspectivism. I examine the arguments for perspectivism, and contend that its strong form is defeasible in principle, not merely in special cases. The argument rests on the plausibility of scientific knowledge concerning non-perspectival, dispositional facts about modelled systems. This forms the basis of a novel suggestion regarding how to understand the knowledge these models afford, in terms of a contrastive theory of what-questions.     

Distinctively mathematical explanation and the problem of directionality: A quasi-erotetic solution

The increasing preponderance of opinion that some natural phenomena can be explained mathematically has inspired a search for a viable account of distinctively mathematical explanation. Among the desiderata for an adequate account is that it should solve the problem of directionality —the reversals of distinctively mathematical explanations should not count as members among the explanatory fold but any solution must also avoid the exclusion of genuine explanations. In what follows, I introduce and defend what I refer to as a quasi-erotetic solution which provides a remedy to the problem in the form of an additional necessary condition on explanation.     

Inference to the best explanation and Norton's material theory of induction

I argue that we should consider Norton's material theory of induction as consisting of two largely independent claims. First, there is the claim that material facts license inductions - a claim which I interpret as a type of contextualism about induction. Second, there is the claim that there are no universal rules of induction. While a good case can be made for the first claim, I believe that Norton's arguments for the second claim are lacking. In particular, I spell out Norton's argument against the claim that all induction may be reduced to inference to the best explanation, and argue that it is not persuasive. Rejecting this part of Norton's theory does not however require us to abandon the first claim that material facts license inductions. In this way, I distinguish the parts of the material theory of induction we should happily accept from the parts about which we should be more skeptical.     

BonJour on explanation and skepticism

Laurence BonJour, among others, has argued that inference to the best explanation allows us to reject skeptical hypotheses in favor of our common-sense view of the world. BonJour considers several skeptical hypotheses, specifically: (i) our experiences arise by mere chance, uncaused; (ii) the simple hypothesis which states merely that our experiences are caused unveridically; and (iii) an elaborated hypothesis which explains in detail how our unveridical experiences are brought about. A central issue is whether the coherence of one’s experience makes that experience more likely to be veridical. BonJour’s recent treatment of “analog” and “digital” skeptical hypotheses is also discussed. I argue that, although there are important lessons to be learned from BonJour’s writings, his use of inference to the best explanation against skepticism is unsuccessful.     

Mechanistic explanation,cognitive systems demarcation,and extended cognition

Approaches to the Internalism–Externalism controversy in the philosophy of mind often involve both (broadly) metaphysical and explanatory considerations. Whereas originally most emphasis seems to have been placed on metaphysical concerns, recently the explanation angle is getting more attention. Explanatory considerations promise to offer more neutral grounds for cognitive systems demarcation than (broadly) metaphysical ones. However, it has been argued that explanation-based approaches are incapable of determining the plausibility of internalist-based conceptions of cognition vis-à-vis externalist ones. On this perspective, improved metaphysics is the route along which to solve the Internalist–Externalist stalemate. In this paper we challenge this claim. Although we agree that explanation-orientated approaches have indeed so far failed to deliver solid means for cognitive system demarcation, we elaborate a more promising explanation-oriented framework to address this issue. We argue that the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance in mechanisms, extended with the criterion of ‘fat-handedness’, is capable of plausibly addressing the cognitive systems demarcation problem, and thus able to decide on the explanatory traction of Internalist vs. Externalist conceptions, on a case-by-case basis. Our analysis also highlights why some other recent mechanistic takes on the problem of cognitive systems demarcation have been unsuccessful. We illustrate our claims with a case on gestures and learning.     

The silence of the norms: The missing historiography of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

History has been disparaged since the late 19th century for not conforming to norms of scientific explanation. Nonetheless, as a matter of fact a work of history upends the regnant philosophical conception of science in the second part of the 20th century. Yet despite its impact, Kuhn’s Structure has failed to motivate philosophers to ponder why works of history should be capable of exerting rational influence on an understanding of philosophy of science. But all this constitutes a great irony and a mystery. The mystery consists of the persistence of a complete lack of interest in efforts to theorize historical explanation. Fundamental questions regarding why an historical account could have any rational influence remain not merely unanswered, but unasked. The irony arises from the fact that analytic philosophy of history went into an eclipse where it remains until this day just around the time that the influence of Kuhn’s great work began to make itself felt. This paper highlights puzzles long ignored regarding the challenges a work of history managed to pose to the epistemic authority of science, and what this might imply generally for the place of philosophy of history vis-à-vis the problems of philosophy.     

Histories of molecules: Reconciling the past

Molecular data and methods have become centrally important to evolutionary analysis, largely because they have enabled global phylogenetic reconstructions of the relationships between organisms in the tree of life. Often, however, molecular stories conflict dramatically with morphology-based histories of lineages. The evolutionary origin of animal groups provides one such case. In other instances, different molecular analyses have so far proved irreconcilable. The ancient and major divergence of eukaryotes from prokaryotic ancestors is an example of this sort of problem. Efforts to overcome these conflicts highlight the role models play in phylogenetic reconstruction. One crucial model is the molecular clock; another is that of ‘simple-to-complex’ modification. I will examine animal and eukaryote evolution against a backdrop of increasing methodological sophistication in molecular phylogeny, and conclude with some reflections on the nature of historical science in the molecular era of phylogeny.     

Understanding,explanation, and unification

In this article I argue that there are two different types of understanding: the understanding we get from explanations, and the understanding we get from unification. This claim is defended by first showing that explanation and unification are not as closely related as has sometimes been thought. A critical appraisal of recent proposals for understanding without explanation leads us to discuss the example of a purely classificatory biology: it turns out that such a science can give us understanding of the world through unification of the phenomena, even though it does not give us any explanations. The two types of understanding identified in this paper, while strictly separate, do have in common that both consist in seeing how the individual phenomena of the universe hang together. Explanations give us connections between the phenomena through the asymmetric, ‘vertical’ relation of determination; unifications give us connections through the symmetric, ‘horizontal’ relation of kinship. We then arrive at a general definition of understanding as knowledge of connections between the phenomena, and indicate that there might be more than two types of understanding.