PHIL690 SP25
Seminar in Special Topics (PHIL690)
Topic: The Nature of Explanation
Dr. Cory Wright
Tuesdays · 5:30pm–8:15pm · LA1–204
Explanation is a central aspect of each of daily lives: we generate them, deploy them, consider others’ explanations, offer critiques, resist them, etc. How can we determine which explanations are the good ones, and which are not? That is a difficult question to answer. But it becomes much more difficult without having the target concept in mind; for one cannot separate out the good explanations from the bad if she does not first know what an explanation is. Consequently, it looks like there is a prior conceptual debate that must be settled before making progress on debates over the norms of explanation.
What features will something have if it counts as an explanation? And will something count as an explanation if it has those features? In the second half of the 20th century, philosophers of science set for themselves the task of answering such questions, just as a priori conceptual analysis was generally falling out of favor. And as it did, most philosophers of science just moved on to more manageable questions about the varieties of explanation (functional, causal, mathematical, statistical, mechanical, nomological, historical, etc.) and discipline-specific scientific explanation (chemical, cellular, cognitive, etc.). While the 20th century closed with no real consensus about the nature of ex- planation, most presumed that, at bottom, explanations belong to a special class of representations. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, some philosophers called this presumption into question. Questions about the nature of explanation remain.
In this seminar, we will read a mix of classical and contemporary works on the topic of explanation by various authors (including Carl Hempel, Wesley Salmon, Nancy Cartwright, Jaegwon Kim, Peter Achinstein, Michael Scriven, Peter Lipton, Kareem Khalifa, and others). We will try to organize the various conceptions and accounts, and try to comprehend the relationship of explanation to modeling, prediction, understanding, idealization, and other epistemic affairs.