We reassess Woodward's counterfactual account of explanation in relation to regularity explananda. Woodward (2005) presents an account of causal explanation. We argue, by using an explanation of Kleiber's law to illustrate, that the account can cover also some non-causal explanations. This leads to a tension between the two key aspects of Woodward's account: the counterfactual aspect and the causal aspect. We explore this tension and make a case for jettisoning the causal aspect as constitutive of explanatory power in connection with regularity explananda.

Abstract.We investigate the evolution of spherically symmetric supernova remnants in which mass loading takes place due to conductively driven evaporation of embedded clouds. Numerical simulations reveal significant differences between the evolution of conductively mass loaded and the ablatively mass loaded remnants studied in Paper I. A main difference is the way in which conductive mass loading is extinguished at fairly early times, once the interior temperature of the remnant falls below ∼10 7 K. Thus, at late times remnants that ablatively mass load are dominated by loaded mass and thermal energy, while those that conductively mass load are dominated by swept-up mass and kinetic energy. Simple approximations to the remnant evolution, complementary to those in Paper I, are given.

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This is a book about the multidisciplinary topic of emergence. Science, philosophy of science, and metaphysics have long been concerned with the question of how order, stability, and novelty are possible and how they happen. How can order come out of disorder? We provide a new account of emergence, contextual emergence, that attempts to answer these questions. Contextual emergence is grounded primarily in the sciences, as opposed to logic or metaphysics. It is both an explanatory and ontological account of emergence that gets us beyond the impasse between “weak” and “strong” emergence in the emergence debates. Contextual emergence challenges the “foundationalist” or hierarchical picture of reality. It emphasizes the ontological and explanatory fundamentality of multiscale stability conditions and their contextual constraints, often operating globally over interconnected, interdependent, and interacting entities and their multiscale relations. Contextual emergence focuses on the conditions that make the existence, stability, and persistence of emergent systems and their states and observables possible. These conditions and constraints are irreducibly multiscale relations, so it is not surprising that scientific explanation is often multiscale. Such multiscale conditions act as gatekeepers for systems to access modal possibilities (e.g. reducing or enhancing a system’s degrees of freedom). Using examples from across the sciences ranging from physics to biology to neuroscience and beyond, we demonstrate that there is an empirically well-grounded, viable alternative to ontological reductionism coupled with explanatory antireductionism (weak emergence) and ontological disunity coupled with the impossibility of robust scientific explanation (strong emergence). Central metaphysics of science concerns are also addressed.