Mechanisms, laws and explanation
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
Concretization, Explanation, and Mechanisms
Traditional accounts of explanation fail to illuminate the explanatory relevance of “models that are descriptively false” in the sense that the regularities they entail fail to obtain. In this paper, I propose an account of explanation, which I call ‘explanation by concretization’, that serves to explicate the explanatory relevance of such models. Starting from a highly abstract and idealized m...
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While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation over laws and nomological explanation, paradigmatic mechanisms—e.g., clocks or synapses – actually exhibit a great deal of stability in their behavior. And while mechanisms of this kind are certainly of great importance, there are many events that do not occur as a conseque...
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According to the sensorimotor account, vision does not imply the construction of internally generated representations of the environment, but it is the skillful exercise of the sensorimotor contingencies obeying sense-specific laws. In this short study, I focus on the notion of “sensorimotor law” and characterize the kind of explanation provided by the sensorimotor theory as a form of covering ...
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Mechanistic explanation has an impressive track record of advancing our understanding of complex, hierarchically organized physical systems, particularly biological and neural systems. But not every complex system can be understood mechanistically. Psychological capacities are often understood by providing cognitive models of the systems that underlie them. I argue that these models, while supe...
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Frances Egan A common kind of explanation in cognitive neuroscience might be called functiontheoretic: with some target cognitive capacity in view, the theorist hypothesizes that the system computes a well-defined function (in the mathematical sense) and explains how computing this function contributes to the exercise of the cognitive capacity. Recently, proponents of the so-called ‘new mechani...
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: European Journal for Philosophy of Science
سال: 2020
ISSN: 1879-4912,1879-4920
DOI: 10.1007/s13194-020-00284-y