In the last couple of years a few seemingly independent debates on scientific explanation have emerged, with several key questions that take different forms in different areas. For example, the questions what makes an explanation distinctly mathematical and are there any non-causal explanations in sciences (i.e., explanations that don’t cite causes in the explanans) sometimes take a form of the question what makes mathematical models explanatory, especially whether highly idealized models in science can be explanatory and in virtue of what they are explanatory. These questions raise further issues about counterfactuals, modality, and explanatory asymmetries: i.e., do mathematical and non-causal explanations support counterfactuals, and how ought we to understand explanatory asymmetries in non-causal explanations? Even though these are very common issues in the philosophy of physics and mathematics, they can be found in different guises in the philosophy of biology where there is the statistical interpretation of the Modern...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
January-February 2019
February 01 2019
Unifying the Debates: Mathematical and Non-Causal Explanations
Daniel Kostić
Daniel Kostić
University Bordeaux Montaigne/SPH and IHPST-CNRS & University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Search for other works by this author on:
Daniel Kostić
University Bordeaux Montaigne/SPH and IHPST-CNRS & University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
This research is funded by the European Commission, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, Excellent Science, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions under REA grant agreement n° 703662; project: Philosophical Foundations of Topological Explanations (Proposal acronym: TOPEX) as well as by the New Aquitaine Region- Bordeaux Montaigne University through the project “Neuroessentialism: neuroscientific explanation and the spread of neuroscience: the case of “neurolaw.”
Online ISSN: 1530-9274
Print ISSN: 1063-6145
© 2019 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2019
by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Perspectives on Science (2019) 27 (1): 1–6.
Citation
Daniel Kostić; Unifying the Debates: Mathematical and Non-Causal Explanations. Perspectives on Science 2019; 27 (1): 1–6. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_e_00296
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.
Sign in via your Institution
Sign in via your InstitutionEmail alerts
Advertisement
Cited By
Related Articles
Multilevel Ensemble Explanations: A Case from Theoretical Biology
Perspectives on Science (February,2019)
Minimal Structure Explanations, Scientific Understanding and Explanatory Depth
Perspectives on Science (February,2019)
Shades of Grey: Granularity, Pragmatics, and Non-Causal Explanation
Perspectives on Science (February,2019)
Related Book Chapters
Unifying Perspectives
Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences
Envisioning the Unified City
The Making of Grand Paris: Metropolitan Urbanism in the Twenty-First Century
A Unifying Framework
Inductive Logic Programming: From Machine Learning to Software Engineering
Unifying Cognition
Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models