The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality. There has been extensive discussion about it. Hume taught that talk of causation was metaphysics and should be consigned to the flames (D. Hume, 1748). We present a comparison between two approaches that model this notion: The first one is the normative approach which is based on an interventionist conception ...

The three cardinal aims of science are prediction, control, and explanation; but the greatest of these is explanation. Also the most inscrutable: prediction aims at truth, and control at happiness, and insofar as we have some independent grasp of these notions, we can evaluate science’s strategies of prediction and control from the outside. Explanation, by contrast, aims at scientific understan...

Although explanation is widely regarded as an important concept in the study of rational inquiry, it remains largely unexplored outside the philosophy of science. This, I believe, is not due to oversight as much as to institutional resistance. In analytic philosophy it is basic that epistemic rationality is a function of justification and that justification is a function of argument. Explanatio...