How to define levels of explanation and evaluate their indispensability

نویسنده

  • Christopher Clarke
چکیده

Some explanations in social science, psychology and biology belong to a higher level than other explanations. And higher explanations possess the virtue of abstracting away from the details of lower explanations, many philosophers argue. As a result, these higher explanations are irreplaceable. And this suggests that there are genuine higher laws or patterns involving social, psychological and biological states. I show that this ‘abstractness argument’ is really an argument schema, not a single argument. This is because the argument uses the ‘is lower than’ relation, and this relation admits of different readings. I then suggest four rigorous definitions of the ‘is lower than’ relation, and show that the abstractness argument’s prospects are much brighter for some of these definitions than for others. To show this, I evaluate the so-called ‘disjunctive threat’ to the abstractness argument. Some explanations belong to a higher level than others. To a very rough approximation, psychological explanations are typically higher than physiological ones, for example; but psychological explanations are typically lower than social ones. And so, for any explanation that correctly explains why a phenomenon occurred, one can ask: is there some lower explanation that also correctly explains the phenomenon? And, if there is, can this lower explanation replace the higher explanation? And by ‘replace’ I mean: the higher explanation provides no understanding (of why the phenomenon occurred) over and above the understanding of it that the lower explanation provides. ∗I am indebted to Christopher Cowie, Tim Lewens and Nick Shea for their helpful comments on an ancestor of this manuscript; and also to two anonymous referees for their generous suggestions. This work has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement no 284123.

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عنوان ژورنال:
  • Synthese

دوره 194  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2017