Coincidence and Common Cause

Lando, Tamar

doi:10.1111/nous.12166

Cited by 19 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…While my emphasis is different, it's quite plausible that when events have a common cause, the best explanation of their conjunction will feature that common cause, and so will be more concise than a concatenation of their best explanations, individually. While there are problems with this account-see Lando (2016) for some ingenious counterexamples, as well as a plausible diagnosis of the problem-it's close enough for present purposes.…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 78%

Climate Change and Cultural Cognition

Greco¹

2021

Philosophy and Climate Change

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How should we form beliefs concerning global climate change? For most of us, directly evaluating the evidence isn’t feasible; we lack expertise. So, any rational beliefs we form will have to be based in part on deference to those who have it. But in this domain, questions about how to identify experts can be fraught. This chapter discusses a partial answer to the question of how we in fact identify experts: Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition thesis, according to which we treat experts on factual questions of political import only insofar as they share our moral and cultural values. The chapter then poses some normative questions about cultural cognition: is it a species of irrationality that must be overcome if we are to communicate scientific results effectively, or is it instead an inescapable part of rational belief management? Ultimately, it is argued that cultural cognition is substantively unreasonable, though not formally irrational.

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Section: )mentioning

confidence: 78%

Climate Change and Cultural Cognition

Greco¹

2021

Philosophy and Climate Change

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“…TA finds considerable support in the literature, and it indeed does well with respect to a wide range of cases (Horwich, 1982;Sober, 1984;Owens, 1992) builds his account of explanation on it). However, in spite of its initial plausibility, TA should be rejected, due to a class of counterexamples highlighted by Lando (2017).…”

Section: The Traditional Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining coincidences

Rizzo

2021

Synthese

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A traditional account of coincidences has it that two facts are coincidental whenever they are not related as cause and effect and do not have a common cause. A recent contribution by Lando (Noûs 51(1): 132–151, 2017) showed that this account is mistaken. In this paper, I argue against two alternative accounts of coincidences, one suggested by Lando, and another by Bhogal (Philos Phenomenol Res 100(3): 677–694, 2020), and defend a third one in their place. In short, I propose that how explanatory links relate to non-coincidental facts in explanation is what drives a wedge between coincidences and non-coincidences. This proposal is not susceptible to the worries I raise, and is more general, since it is not restricted to coincidences and non-coincidences involving physical facts.

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“…19 There are numerous plausible candidates for such explanatorily brute facts, ranging from various mundane coincidences to fundamental physical truths (for some examples, see Owens, 1992; Barnes, 1994;Fahrbach, 2005;Lando, 2017). For any such fact, there is a phenomenon that is better understood if one's representation of the phenomenon includes a depiction of the very fact that makes it unexplainable, viz.…”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond Explanation: Understanding as Dependency Modelling

Dellsén

2020

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

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This paper presents and argues for an account of objectual understanding that aims to do justice to the full range of cases of scientic understanding, including cases in which one does not have an explanation of the understood phenomenon. According to the proposed account, one understands a phenomenon just in case one grasps a suciently accurate and comprehensive model of the ways in which it or its features are situated within a network of dependence relations; one's degree of understanding is proportional to the comprehensiveness and accuracy of such a model. I compare this account with accounts of scientic understanding that explicate understanding in terms of having an explanation of the understood phenomenon. I discuss three distinct types of cases in which scientic understanding does not amount to possessing an explanation of any kind, and argue that the proposed model-based account can accommodate these cases while still retaining a strong link between understanding and explanation.

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Coincidence and Common Cause

Cited by 19 publications

References 20 publications

Climate Change and Cultural Cognition

Climate Change and Cultural Cognition

Explaining coincidences

Beyond Explanation: Understanding as Dependency Modelling

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