Overview

Description

COURSE DETAILS:

Selected Topics: Explanation

[Note: this course is to be taught concurrently with PHIL 455W D100.]

Important note regarding enrollment: All seats are reserved for Philosophy Graduate students. Enrollments from other departments will be considered only upon submission of the Graduate Course Add Form, and with instructor's permission. All such enrollments will be done in or after the first week of classes.

This course will consider issues related to explanation, primarily from a philosophy of science perspective and with connections to other topics in metaphysics and to epistemology, including some action explanation. Causal explanation, and the extent to which it requires specific accounts of causation, and the range of explanations that count as causal (from explanations in physics through to precedents around causal responsibility in law), will be considered. Recent developments in causation and causal modeling offer rigorous ways to detect and represent causal relations in many kinds of systems. Do these techniques provide explanations, or merely predictions? How should control be understood in the context of explanation versus prediction? What differentiates scientific explanation from other kinds of explanation?  How do causal explanations differ from or relate to nomological explanations? How can explanations involving probabilistic premises explain individual occurrences: for example, how does a statement like, "95% of events of type X cause events of type Y" suffice in explanations involving claims like "an event of type X happened, and it caused the event of type Y to happen"? We will consider a range of specific issues within debates around explanation, such as question of the explanation of singular versus repeatable explananda, the relationship between explanation and human understanding: what, if any, conditions for intelligibility ought there be on explanations? Finally, depending on student interest, we will consider issues such as methodological holism as a constraint on explanations; the issue of causation with respect to action explanations - are actions explanations simply a subspecies of causal explanation, or do they have distinctive features that cannot be accounted for simply as causal; and pragmatist approaches to explanation. The goal will be to learn enough about causal explanation especially, to be able to apply it in other debates that involve explanations but are not directly about explanation.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Successful completion of this course will satisfy the “M&E Stream” or the "History Stream" distribution requirement toward the MA degree for Philosophy graduate students.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: