Work in progress

Scientific Explanation

1. Living Without Ontic Explanation

2. Towards A Cognitive Approach to Scientific Explanation

3. A New Epistemic Conception of Scientific Explanation

   • My three manuscripts on scientific explanation are on conceptions of scientific explanation, the inquiry concerning (1) what type of thing is an explanation and (2) what type of relation something must stand in to be explanatory. I present and develop my answers to these two issues in the three papers. Those answers culminate in my own version of the epistemic conception of scientific explanation, according to which an explanation is ultimately a matter of helping people know about what the world is like. More specifically speaking, my view consists of the following claims. First, what does the explaining is a representation formulated by human beings ("Living Without Ontic Explanation"). Second, an explanatory relation is not purely objective but epistemic in the following respects. First, for a representation formulated by human beings to be explanatory, it must represent what we are justified in believing is a part of the world responsible for the occurrence of a target of explanation ("A New Epistemic Conception of Scientific Explanation"). In addition, a representation must represent what it represents in a cognitively manageable way, namely in a way that allows a human scientist to see why the target of explanation occurs ("Towards A Cognitive Approach to Scientific Explanation").  

Causation

1. Hitchcock and Causation by Omission

   • According to Hitchcock, we think omission and paradigmatic cases of token causation with positive events differently even though they are the same in having counterfactual dependence. Based on this idea, he develops an analysis of token causation which reflects this difference. The aim of this paper is to show that Hitchcock’s view on omission is flawed. I will argue two things. First, there is no intuition of difference between cases of positive events and cases of omission on which Hitchcock grounds his analysis of token causation. Second, the way he theorizes the difference has other problems: It can yield two different results for one and the same omission case, which is not desirable. In section 1, I will explain Hitchcock’s approach to omission. In section 2, I will argue against the points Hitchcock makes to differentiate cases of positive events and those of omission. In section 3, I will argue that Hitchcock’s theory of omission has additional problems. I will conclude that omission and causation by positive events should not be treated differently, as Hitchcock does, but rather equally. 

Laws of Nature

1. Saving the Explanatory Power of Humean Laws of Nature

• Marc Lange argues that Humeanism about laws of nature fails because it cannot account for the explanatory power expected of laws. The aim of this paper is to show that his argument is not successful. In section 1, I will introduce Humeanism and non-Humeanism. I will address why some non-Humeans including Lange have questioned Humeanism on the ground of the explanatory power of laws in section 2. In section 3, I will then refute Lange’s argument.