Note: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
Purchase Benefits
What is included with this book?
List of Figures and Table | p. xi |
Preface | p. xiii |
The Causal Approach to Explanation | |
Approaches to Explanation | p. 3 |
Causal Explanation and Explanatory Relevance | p. 3 |
Preliminaries | p. 6 |
Accounts of the Explanatory Relation | p. 11 |
The Causal Element in Explanation | p. 23 |
The Pursuit of Explanation | p. 37 |
Causal and Explanatory Relevance | p. 41 |
The Minimal Causal Account of Event Explanation | p. 41 |
The Problem of Relevance | p. 45 |
The Probabilistic Solution | p. 52 |
The Counterfactual Solution | p. 56 |
The Manipulationist Solution | p. 60 |
The Kairetic Account of Explanation | |
The Kairetic Account of Difference-Making | p. 69 |
Overview of the Kairetic Account | p. 69 |
Causal Models | p. 71 |
States of Affairs | p. 84 |
The Eliminative Procedure | p. 86 |
Abstraction and Optimizing | p. 96 |
Cohesion | p. 101 |
The Optimizing Procedure | p. 109 |
Rival Accounts of Difference-Making Reconsidered | p. 110 |
The Kairetic Account of Explanation | p. 117 |
Standalone Explanation | p. 117 |
Difference-Making and Transitivity in Compound Explanations | p. 121 |
Comparing Standalone Explanations | p. 123 |
Laplacean Blindness | p. 138 |
Extending the Kairetic Account | p. 142 |
Quantifying Explanatory Relevance | p. 142 |
Trading Off Accuracy for Generality | p. 145 |
The Explanatory Framework | p. 148 |
Black Boxes, Functional Properties, and Multiple Realizability | p. 154 |
Aggregative Explanation | p. 169 |
Contrastive Explanation | p. 174 |
Beyond Causal Explanation | p. 177 |
Event Explanation and Causal Claims | p. 181 |
Background Conditions versus Causes | p. 182 |
Preemption | p. 186 |
Nonevents as Difference-Makers | p. 200 |
Nonevents as Explananda | p. 205 |
Transitivity | p. 208 |
Three Kinds of Causation | p. 215 |
Explanation of Laws and Regularities | |
Regularity Explanation | p. 219 |
Approaches to Regularity Explanation | p. 219 |
Explaining Laws with Mechanisms | p. 222 |
Basing Generalizations | p. 228 |
Property Laws | p. 265 |
Other Laws | p. 279 |
The Metaphysics of High and Low | p. 288 |
Abstraction in Regularity Explanation | p. 297 |
Problems of Abstraction in Regularity Explanation | p. 297 |
Explaining Boyle's Law | p. 304 |
A Theory of Idealization | p. 315 |
Mathematically Driven Explanation | p. 329 |
Probabilistic Explanation | |
Approaches to Probabilistic Explanation | p. 335 |
Explanatory Questions | p. 335 |
Varieties of Probabilistic Explanation: Examples | p. 337 |
Varieties of Probabilistic Explanation: Commentary | p. 341 |
Accounts of Probabilistic Explanation | p. 344 |
Elitism versus Egalitarianism | p. 347 |
Probability and Determinism | p. 355 |
Formal Elements of the Kairetic Approach | p. 358 |
Kairetic Explanation of Frequencies | p. 367 |
Probabilistic Explanation in Deterministic Systems | p. 367 |
Explanation with Complex Probability | p. 368 |
Explanation with Quasiprobability | p. 401 |
Elitism versus Egalitarianism the Kairetic Way | p. 412 |
Regularity Explanation and Probabilistic Metaphysics | p. 418 |
Kairetic Explanation of Single Outcomes | p. 424 |
Single-Outcome Explanation | p. 424 |
Robustness | p. 433 |
Nonexplanatory Probability-Raisers | p. 437 |
Nonexplanatory Critical Events | p. 447 |
Elitism and Egalitarianism Revisited | p. 452 |
Valediction | |
Looking Outward | p. 459 |
Biology: Probabilistic Explanation | p. 459 |
Psychology: Content and Explanation | p. 464 |
Economics: Abstraction | p. 468 |
Explanatory Autonomy | p. 470 |
Looking Inward | p. 473 |
Notes | p. 477 |
References | p. 495 |
Index | p. 505 |
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.