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In this paper, I aim to develop a virtue epistemological account of scientific explanation and understanding. In so doing, I build a link between intellectual virtue and scientific explanation through understanding. The central epistemological question I will focus on is how human beings understand the world through scientific explanation. The answ...

Once acquired, status as a theoretical virtue is rarely lost. But recent philosophical criticisms of parsimony argue its scope is rather limited and its justificatory basis quite thin. In fact, psychological studies cast a pall on positive assessments of parsimony. They show simplicity considerations frequently derail correct probabilistic inferenc...

Abstract We defend a noetic account of intramathematical explanation. On this view, a piece of mathematics is explanatory just in case it produces an appropriate type of understanding. We motivate the view by presenting some appealing features of noeticism. We then discuss and criticize the most prominent extant version of noeticism, due to Matthew...

Recent philosophical work on explanation explores the notion of “constraints” and the role they play in scientific explanation. An influential account of “explanation by constraint” is provided by Lange (2017), who considers these topics in the context of the physical sciences. Lange’s account contains two main features. First, he suggest...

Several philosophers have argued that “constraints” constrain (and thereby explain) by virtue of being modally stronger than ordinary laws of nature. In this way, a constraint applies to all possible systems in a broader (i.e., more inclusive) sense of “possible” than the sense in play when we say that the ordinary laws of nature apply to a...

In the literature on explanation, philosophers have proposed different conceptions of structural explanations. In this paper, I explore how several seemingly disparate accounts of structural explanation can be tied together with a central notion of abstraction borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics. Some explanations involve abstracting from a...