Explanation

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 subject as an individual to seeing that individual as a node in a network of explanatory relations. I will then tie this account of structural explanation by abstraction to Wilkenfeld’s (2019) account of understanding to show how this class of structural explanations by abstraction is understanding-conducive.

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 Inglis and Juan-Pablo Mejía-Ramos, which identifies explanatory understanding with the possession of detailed cognitive schemas. Finally, we present a novel noetic account. On our view, explanatory understanding arises from meeting specific explanatory objectives, the theory of which we briefly set out.

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 answer I will give is that our understanding of the world is achieved by the alignment of intellectual virtue and explanation structure.

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 inference. We investigate another way theoretical virtues may corrupt reasoning: the terms labeling theoretical virtues themselves produce a framing effect. Our results show merely labeling explanations “simple” exacerbated participants’ neglect of base-rate information. This finding complements recent empirically-oriented criticisms and broaches underexplored issues about whether “theoretical virtues” involve false advertising.