Probability, explanation, and information

Railton, Peter

doi:10.1007/bf01063889

Cited by 280 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Yet, I have described how more specificity can be added to explanations by incorporating further relevant constraints, and this possibility reveals a further asset: it makes sense of the very idea of a partial causal explanation in the absence of laws. Railton (1981) has offered one of the best accounts of what it means to offer a partial explanation, suggesting that it involves offering information about an "ideal explanatory text" which stands behind the explanandum. Railton presumes that the nodes in the ideal explanation are connected by laws, but Woodward (2003), responding to Railton, suggests a range of cases in which information about an ideal explanatory text is no explanation at all, and that includes when relevant causal laws are known (175-181).…”

Section: Assets Of Channelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition Theory and Channeling Explanation

Eliot¹

2011

Philosophy and Theory in Biology

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The complexity and heterogeneity of causes influencing ecology's domain challenge its capacity to generate a general theory without exceptions, raising the question of whether ecology is capable, even in principle, of achieving the sort of theoretical success enjoyed by physics. Weber has argued that competition theory built around the Competitive Exclusion Principle (especially Tilman's resource-competition model) offers an example of ecology identifying a law-like causal regularity. However, I suggest that as Weber presents it, the CEP is not yet a causal regularity. Instead, I argue that the scientific understanding in Tilman's theory takes a different form. The theory explains through a structure I call "channeling explanation" which does not depend on deduction from general laws, but rather builds on constraints and trade-offs represented in state-space. Recognizing this structure supports the more general point that ecology and other so-called special sciences can reveal novel theoretical approaches to philosophy of science when approached with openness to their uniqueness.

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Section: Assets Of Channelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition Theory and Channeling Explanation

Eliot¹

2011

Philosophy and Theory in Biology

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“…Yet, even with this constraint the explanatory tent must still be a large one, as casual enthusiasts harbor disagreements respecting both motivation and form. After all, while some see explanations as concerned with difference-making (Lewis 1986;Woodward 2003), with mechanistic models (Bechtel 2008;Glennan 2002;Machamer et al 2000), or with a combination of the two (Craver 2007;Strevens 2008), others suggest that an ideal explanation will trace most or all of an event's causal influences-whether difference-making or no (Railton 1981;Salmon 1984). My own view, the Causal Economy account (Franklin-Hall forthcoming), longs to move in this causal-explanatory crowd.…”

Section: -The Causal Economy Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather than an event's explanation offering up a total, fine-grained causal-influential chronicle-as would be provided by one of Railton's (1981) 'ideal explanatory texts'-a complete explanation should cite just a special part of that saga. The precise size and shape of this partjust which features its includes, and which it does not-will depend on the architecture of the run-up to the event in question.…”

Section: -The Causal Economy Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Causal Selection with Explanatory Causal Economy: Biology and Beyond

Franklin-Hall

2015

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

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Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes -and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this 'causal selection problem' in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled solution to it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples, including to a debate concerning the 'causal democracy' of organismal development, with an anti-democratic (though not a gene-centric) moral. 1-Introduction: Explanatory Sparseness and SystematicityOur universe is dizzyingly complex, and everything that happens within it causally depends on innumerable other things. The living world in particular can appear almost horrifically complicated. Though some of this complexity remains beyond our grasp, scientists have unraveled ever-larger portions of it. The combination of this complex world and our increasingly sophisticated theories accounting for it should make two features of our causal-explanatory practice appear surprising: its sparseness and its systematicity.Explanatory practice is sparse in that many apparently legitimate causal explanations are rather thin affairs, in which happenings are accounted for with only the tiniest sliver of information, and not by citing all, or even very many, of an event's causal influences. 2 Explanatory practice is systematic in that those few morsels that sparse explanations feed to us do not seem to emerge higgledy-piggledy, as if they were the output of some 'explanatory lottery' in 1 For helpful comments on this paper, thanks to David Frank, Maria Kronfleldner, Michael Strevens and David Velleman. Special thanks are due to the editors of this volume, PierreAlain Braillard and Christophe Malaterre, both for their patience and for their perceptive editorial suggestions. 2 The distinction between explanations as communicative acts and explanations construed in an 'ontic' mode as sets of facts will not loom large in this paper; throughout, I will presume that the content of communicative acts are the explanatorily relevant facts.

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“…On this view, Rasputin's being poisoned and even the gravitational influence of Mars are explanatorily relevant to his death. Railton (1981) comes close to advocating this position, and Salmon (1984) seems to sympathize.…”

Section: Other Approaches To Explanatory Relevancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…If anything, the best known versions of the causal approach-in particular, Salmon (1984) and Railton (1981)-take a laisser-faire approach, on which it is pure pragmatics that determines which elements of the causal web are mentioned in response to a given explanatory request; see section 3.3. 2…”

Section: The Causal Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Causal and Unification Approaches to Explanation Unified—Causally

Strevens

2004

Nous

138

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Two major modern accounts of explanation are the causal and the unification accounts. My aim in this paper is to provide a kind of unification of the two, by using the central technical apparatus of the unification account to solve a central problem faced by the causal account, namely, the problem of determining which parts of a causal network are explanatorily relevant to the occurrence of an explanandum. The result is a causal account of explanation that has many of the advantages of the unification account.

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Probability, explanation, and information

Cited by 280 publications

References 3 publications

Competition Theory and Channeling Explanation

Competition Theory and Channeling Explanation

Explaining Causal Selection with Explanatory Causal Economy: Biology and Beyond

The Causal and Unification Approaches to Explanation Unified—Causally

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