Explanatory Particularism In Scientific Practice
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Explanatory Particularism in Scientific Practice
Author: Melinda Bonnie Fagan
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-03-23
Explanatory Particularism in Scientific Practice offers a novel community-centric account of scientific explanation. On this view, explanations are products of collaborative activity in particular communities. Philosophers of science studying explanation have traditionally seen their task as analyzing the common or fundamental core of explanations across the sciences. Melinda Bonnie Fagan takes the opposite view: diversity of explanations across the sciences is a basic feature of scientific practice. A scientific community produces explanations that advance understanding of some target of interest, but just what features advance understanding, and what understanding amounts to in practice, varies widely over time and across scientific communities. This particularist approach brings new problems and questions to the fore, especially concerning interdisciplinarity: how (if at all) do explanation and understanding get beyond the boundary of a particular community? The particularist account also has implications bearing on the nature of understanding, the unity of science, objectivity, and science-society relations. The argument is elaborated using detailed case studies of explanatory model connection, or lack thereof: immunology and epidemiology models in the COVID-19 pandemic and the explanatory ambitions of systems biology, using the example of stem cell development. The argument concludes with an open-ended list of potential future case studies.
The Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods
The Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods adopts a pluralistic, interdisciplinary approach to causality. It formulates distinct questions and problems of causality as they arise across scientific and policy fields. Exploring, in a comparative way, how these questions and problems are addressed in different areas, the Handbook fosters dialogue and exchange. It emphasizes the role of the researchers and the normative considerations that arise in the development of methodological and empirical approaches. The Handbook includes authors from all over the world and with many different disciplinary backgrounds, and its 50 chapters appear in print here for the first time. The chapters are organized into the following seven parts: Causal Pluralism from Theory to Practice Causal Theory and the Role of Researchers Features of Causal Systems Causal Methods, Experimentation and Observation Measurement and Data Causality, Knowledge, and Action Causal Theory across Disciplinary Borders Essential reading for scholars interested in an interdisciplinary approach to causality and causal methods, the volume is also a valuable resource for advanced undergraduates as well as for graduate students interested in delving into the rich field of causality. Chapters 15 and 36 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography
Bringing sophisticated philosophy to bear on real-life historiography, Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography rekindles and invigorates the debate on two perennials in the theory and methodology of history. One is the tension between historians' values and the ideal—or illusion—of objective historiography. The other is historical explanation. The point of departure for the treatment of values and objectivity is an exceptionally heated debate on Cold War historiography in Denmark, involving not only historians but also the political parties, the national newspapers, and the courts. The in-depth analysis that follows concludes that historians can produce accounts that deserve the label "objective," even though their descriptions are tinged by ineluctable epistemic instability. A separate chapter dissects the postmodern notion of situated truths. The second part of the book proffers a new take on historical explanation. It is based on the notion of the ideal explanatory text, which allows for not only causal—including intentional—but also nomological, structural, and functional explanations. The approach, which can accommodate narrative explanations driven by causal plots, is ecumenical but not all-encompassing. Emergent social properties and supernatural entities are excluded from the ideal explanatory text, making scientific historiography methodologically individualistic—albeit with room for explanations at higher levels when pragmatically justified—and atheist. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative License.