Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 1990"
TL;DR: The problem of explanation has been defined as the problem of understanding the relation "x explains y" as discussed by the authors, i.e., how one obtains the beliefs and how to explain them.
Abstract: When philosophers discuss the topic of explanation, they usually have in mind the following question: given the beliefs one has and some proposition that one wishes to explain, which subset of the beliefs constitutes an explanation of the target proposition? That is, the philosophical ‘problem of explanation’ typically has bracketed the issue of how one obtains the beliefs; they are taken as given. The problem of explanation has been the problem of understanding the relation ‘x explains y’. Since Hempel (1965) did so much to canonize this way of thinking about explanation, it deserves to be called ‘Hempel's problem’.
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TL;DR: The work of the later Wittgenstein has had a vast influence in the field of social science as discussed by the authors, which is hardly surprising as the effect of that philosophy has been an emphasis on the priority of the social.
Abstract: The work of the later Wittgenstein has had a vast influence in the field of social science. This is hardly surprising as the effect of that philosophy has been an emphasis on the priority of the social. Empiricist philosophy started with the private experience of the individual and from there built up an inter-subjective picture of the world. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, began with the rule-governed practices of a community. Both the nature of private experience, and of an objective world, was deemed to depend on concepts all could share. Society is the source of such concepts and thus becomes the key notion in our understanding of ourselves and our relation to the world.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the truth value of all singular causal statements are logically determined by the truth values of statements of causal laws, together with the truthvalues of non-causal statements about particulars.
Abstract: In his recent book, Causation: A Realistic Approach, Michael Tooley discusses the following thesis, which he calls the ‘thesis of the Humean Supervenience of Causal Relations’:(T) The truth values of all singular causal statements are logically determined by the truth values of statements of causal laws, together with the truth values of non-causal statements about particulars (p. 182).(T) represents one version of the ‘Humean’ idea that there is no more factual content to the claim that two particular events are causally connected than that they occur, instantiate some law or regularity, and perhaps bear some appropriate non-causal (e.g. spatio-temporal) to each other. This is an idea that is tacitly or explicitly assumed in most familiar accounts of singular causal statements. For example (T) is assumed by many probabilistic theories of singular causal statements, by theories which attempt to analyse singular causal statements in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and, as I shall argue below, by David Lewis' counterfactual theory.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine and in part revive a time-honoured perspective to inquiry in general and scientific explanation in particular, which is to view inquiry as a search for answers to questions.
Abstract: In this paper I propose to examine, and in part revive, a time-honoured perspective to inquiry in general and scientific explanation in particular. The perspective is to view inquiry as a search for answers to questions. If there is anything that deserves to be called a working scientist's view of his or her daily work, it surely is that he or she phrases questions and attempts to find satisfactory answers to them.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors cite a passage from Wittgenstein's On Certainty (OC, 611) as the source of the title of their book. But they do not specify the author of this passage.
Abstract: ‘Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic’ This sentence from Wittgenstein's On Certainty (OC, 611) is the source of my title. A passage in George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant might have prompted the same choice: ‘The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives’ (Orwell, 1950, 177).
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TL;DR: A well-known remark in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations which even some philosophers sympathetic to his work have found very hard to accept as mentioned in this paper, is that philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.
Abstract: There is a well-known remark in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations which even some philosophers sympathetic to his work have found very hard to accept. It reads:
Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.
For it cannot give it any foundation either.
It leaves everything as it is. (PI, i, para. 24)
Surely, it is said, that is carrying matters too far. Wittgenstein’s hyperbole should be excused as a harmless stylistic flourish.
TL;DR: The authors argue that explanations in the social sciences are fundamentally (logically or structurally) different from those in the natural sciences, and they call such difference theorists "difference theorists".
Abstract: Are explanations in the social sciences fundamentally (logically or structurally) different from explanations in the natural sciences? Many philosophers think that they are, and I call such philosophers ‘difference theorists’. Many difference theorists locate that difference in the alleged fact that only in the natural sciences does explanation essentially include laws.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the answer to the first question requires acceptance of the sort of fullblown notion of causation that only a scientific realist can love, and that the solution to the second question requires a realist construal of scientific theories and scientific methodology.
Abstract: A few years ago, Bas van Fraassen reminded philosophers of science that there are two central questions that a theory of explanation ought to answer. First, what is a (good) explanation—when has something been explained satisfactorily? Second, why do we value explanations? (van Fraassen, 1977, 1980, ch. 5). For a long time, discussions of explanation concentrated on technical problems connected with the first of these questions, and the second was by and large ignored. But, in fact, I think it is the second question which raises the more fundamental and interesting philosophical issues. I shall offer reasons for thinking that the answer to the first question requires acceptance of the sort of fullblown notion of causation that only a scientific realist can love, and that the answer to the second question requires a realist construal of scientific theories and scientific methodology. My argument will be mainly negative, surveying the problems facing some major alternative accounts of explanation. A full elaboration of the realist perspective will have to await the completion of work in progress.
TL;DR: In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, written in 1945, Wittgenstein remarks that: "It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another, but, of course, it is not likely" as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations , written in 1945, Wittgenstein remarks that: ‘It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely’ (PI, viii). There was quite obviously no question for him of endeavouring to dissipate the darkness of the age itself, but at the most of introducing light into a small number of receptive minds, the existence of which he considered, moreover, as problematical. In a rough draft of the preface to the Philosophical Remarks that he wrote in 1930 he says: I realize … that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. (CV, 6)
TL;DR: A short paper on Wittgenstein's views on mathematical proof is to be given a tall order as discussed by the authors, especially if little or no familiarity either with mathematics or with the philosophy is presupposed, and the roots of his discussions of mathematical proof go deep to some of the most basic and difficult ideas in his later philosophy.
Abstract: To be asked to provide a short paper on Wittgenstein's views on mathematical proof is to be given a tall order (especially if little or no familiarity either with mathematics or with Wittgenstein's philosophy is to be presupposed!). Close to one half of Wittgenstein's writings after 1929 concerned mathematics, and the roots of his discussions, which contain a bewildering variety of underdeveloped and sometimes conflicting suggestions, go deep to some of the most basic and difficult ideas in his later philosophy. So my aims in what follows are forced to be modest. I shall sketch an intuitively attractive philosophy of mathematics and illustrate Wittgenstein's opposition to it. I shall explain why, contrary to what is often supposed, that opposition cannot be fully satisfactorily explained by tracing it back to the discussions of following a rule in the Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Finally, I shall try to indicate very briefly something of the real motivation for Wittgenstein's more strikingly deflationary suggestions about mathematical proof, and canvass a reason why it may not in the end be possible to uphold them.
TL;DR: Wittgenstein this article pointed out that confounding reasons and causes are the basis of confounding experiences and causes, and argued that Freud confounded them, and why he was entitled to hold that they confounded him.
Abstract: The ‘abominable mess’ of which Wittgenstein complains is that of confounding reasons and causes. What does Wittgenstein mean to call attention to by this contrast and why does he think himself entitled to hold that Freud confounded them? Sometimes by reasons he means just what someone says on being asked why he did what he did or reacted as he reacted, and sometimes what an experience meant to a subject on further reflection upon it—its ‘further description’.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors define the explanatory discipline within which I ask my title question, which is ambiguous and is in want of some initial clarification, and they propose a set of explanatory disciplines, such as biology, physics, social sciences, and the like.
Abstract: My title question as it stands is ambiguous, and is in want of some initial clarification. Does the question ask how the explanandum is logically related to the explanans? Or does it ask about the details of the dynamics of the explanation speech-act? Or does it ask how the linguistic ambiguities of explanation questions and answers should properly be unpacked? Or does it ask yet some other question?The ways of studying explanation, like the ways of understanding the world, are many and varied. By this, I mean more than that the phenomenon of explanation can be studied as it arises in the different disciplines of biology, physics, the social sciences, and the like. Rather, I mean that there are varied disciplines of explanation-study itself. For example, the Hempelian tradition has largely focused on the logic of explanation, and others have focused on the linguistic, psychological, social, and epistemological angles of explanation. Thus, it is not appropriate for me to begin by arguing that explanation is a set of logically related statements or a speech-act (just as one does not begin by arguing ‘the world’ is a sociological or physical phenomenon), but appropriate instead to begin by specifying the explanatory discipline within which I ask my title question.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors defend the covering law account of explanation in the physical sciences at least as an ideal, and raise some issues where we disagree, especially in the important area of statistical explanation.
Abstract: The corpus of physical theory is a paradigm of knowledge. The evolution of modern physical theory constitutes the clearest exemplar of the growth of knowledge. If the development of physical theory does not constitute an example of progress and growth in what we know about the Universe nothing does. So anyone interested in the theory of knowledge must be interested consequently in the evolution and content of physical theory. Crucial to the conception of physics as a paradigm of knowledge is the way in which physical theory provides explanations of a vast diversity of natural phenomena on the basis of a very few fundamental principles. A central problem for the epistemologist is therefore what is theoretical explanation in physics? Here we can get good insight from what Redhead has said (this volume pp. 145–54). Indeed one could agree with almost everything Redhead says and simply endorse much of his careful and extensive defence of the covering law account of explanation in the physical sciences at least as an ideal. However I shall, I fear, try the reader's patience by extending some of the considerations he introduced and raising those issues where we disagree, especially in the important area of statistical explanation.
TL;DR: This article argued that the success-guaranteeing account of truth conditions is incomplete until it is placed in a teleological context and that the teleological theory is inadequate unless it incorporates the thesis that truth is the guarantee of successful action.
Abstract: A number of recent writers have argued that we should explain mental representation teleologically, in terms of the biological purposes of beliefs and other mental states. A rather older idea is that the truth condition of a belief is that condition which guarantees that actions based on that belief will succeed. What I want to show in this paper is that these two ideas complement each other. The teleological theory is inadequate unless it incorporates the thesis that truth is the guarantee of successful action. Conversely, the success-guaranteeing account of truth conditions is incomplete until it is placed in a teleological context.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that there are two distinct ways in which causal factors operate in the world, two distinct kinds of causality, and so two distinct explanations: scientific explanations and personal explanations.
Abstract: In purporting to explain the occurrence of some event or process we cite the causal factors which, we assert, brought it about or keeps it in being. The explanation is a true one if those factors did indeed bring it about or keep it in being. In discussing explanation I shall henceforward (unless I state otherwise) concern myself only with true explanations. I believe that there are two distinct kinds of way in which causal factors operate in the world, two distinct kinds of causality, and so two distinct kinds of explanation. For historical reasons, I shall call these kinds of causality and explanations ‘scientific’ and ‘personal’; but I do not imply that there is anything unscientific in a wide sense in invoking personal explanation.
TL;DR: In the first and shorter part of this essay as discussed by the authors, we comment on Wittgenstein's general influence on the practice of philosophy since his time and discuss aspects of his work which have had a more particular influence, chiefly on debates about meaning and mind.
Abstract: In the first and shorter part of this essay I comment on Wittgenstein's general influence on the practice of philosophy since his time. In the second and much longer part I discuss aspects of his work which have had a more particular influence, chiefly on debates about meaning and mind. The aspects in question are Wittgenstein's views about rule-following and private language. This second part is more technical than the first.
TL;DR: When I was first approached to read a paper at the conference from which this volume takes its beginning, I expected that Flint Schier, with whom I had taught a course on the Philosophy of Biology in my years at Glasgow, would be with us to comment and to criticize as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: When I was first approached to read a paper at the conference from which this volume takes its beginning I expected that Flint Schier, with whom I had taught a course on the Philosophy of Biology in my years at Glasgow, would be with us to comment and to criticize. I cannot let this occasion pass without expressing once again my own sense of loss. I am sure that we would all have gained by his presence, and hope that he would find things both to approve, and disapprove, in the following venture.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism, which is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically.
Abstract: Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism.