You are kindly invited to attend the symposium

 Mechanisms, Understanding, and the Ontic View of Explanation

Wednesday 29 April 2015, 14:00-17:00
VU University Amsterdam, Department of Philosophy
Room 2E-53, VU Main Building, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam

PROGRAM

14:00-15:00    Cory Wright (California State University)
Ontic explanations are either ontic or explanatory, but not both

15:00-15:30    Coffee and tea break

15:30-16:30    Marta Halina (University of Cambridge)
Idealization, abstraction, and the ontic view

16:30-17:00    General discussion

Organization: Henk de Regt, h.w.de.regt@vu.nl

Admission is free. If you plan to attend, please send me an email.

ABSTRACTS

Idealization, abstraction, and the ontic view

Marta Halina (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)

The ontic causal-mechanical view of explanation holds that models are explanatory insofar as they convey information about those mechanisms responsible for a phenomenon of interest. A common criticism of this view is that it fails to account for the explanatory practices of science. Scientists do not aim to develop complete and accurate models of causal mechanisms, the criticism goes, but rely on abstract and idealized models to explain instead. I argue that this criticism misses precisely the point that proponents of the ontic view have taken pains to convey – that explanation and understanding are distinct. While an explanation is the target of an explanatory model, certain features of that model (such as its abstract and idealized nature) may lead to greater understanding. The goals of explanation and understanding impose distinct constraints on modeling practices. The ontic view is able to account for this dual set of constraints, while the epistemic view (the position commonly adopted by the critics) fails to do so unless it is supplemented by a set of ontic commitments about the sorts of things that are the proper referent of an explanatory model.

Ontic explanations are either ontic or explanatory, but not both

Cory Wright (Department of Philosophy, California State University)
According to a prominent version of the ontic conception of explanation, scientific explanation is causal explanation and causal explanations are extant relationships in the world between token causes and the events (activities, phenomena, etc.) they produce. The ontic conception arises from a failure to recognize the linguistic shortcuts invoked in articulating it. (We say that the O-rings explained the Challenger explosion only for broadly Gricean reasons of communicative ease—not because doing so gets at some fundamental philosophical truth.) Thus, a fundamental flaw of conceiving explanations ontically is the paradox it foists on us: we can accept its pronouncements as literal truths only if we also commit to the metaphorical personification of nature it requires. A more interesting reason to treat the ontic conception as a philosophical hiccup is that it forces us to ignore the ubiquitous role of abstraction and generalization in scientific explanation, and thus leaves us with an unacceptable trade-off: either ontic explanations are genuine explanations that are scientifically useless, or scientifically useful explanations are not ontic explanations. This suggests that ontic explanations are either ontic or explanatory, but not both. Ultima facie, any mechanists tempted by an ontic conception can have everything they want by appealing to an epistemic conception of causal explanation that builds in assumptions about semantic realism.