What does it mean for scientists to truly understand, rather than to merely describe, how the
world works? Michael Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientific explanation and …

Reasons Why first argues that what philosophers are really after, or at least should be after,
when they seek a theory of explanation, is a theory of answers to why-questions. It then …

" Mahoney's starting point is the problem of essentialism in social science. Essentialism--the
belief that the members of a category possess hidden properties (" essences") that make …

If folk science means individuals having well worked out mechanistic theories of the
workings of the world, then it is not feasible. Laypeople's explanatory understandings are …

Seven studies examined how people learn causal relationships in scenarios when the
variables are temporally dependent–the states of variables are stable over time. When …

Thinkers sympathetic to the autonomy of the special sciences—and emergentists in
particular—typically think, not only that the special sciences are not reducible to the …

Humean reductionism about laws of nature appears to leave a central aspect of scientific
practice unmotivated: If the world's fundamental structure is exhausted by the actual …

We investigated, experimentally, the contention that the folk view, or naïve theory, of time,
amongst the population we investigated (ie US residents) is dynamical. We found that …

Reichenbach explains temporally asymmetric phenomena by appeal to entropy and 'branch
structure'. He explains why the entropic gradients of isolated subsystems are oriented …

Ursachen spielen im Alltag und in der Wissenschaft eine zentrale Rolle. Wir stützen uns auf
Ursachenwissen wenn wir Vorhersagen machen, wenn wir Phänomene erklären, wenn wir …