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Generalizing the Ontic Conception of Scientific Explanation Mark Povich Washington University in St Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-15-2017 Model and World: Generalizing the Ontic Conception of Scientific Explanation Mark Povich Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the Philosophy of Science Commons Recommended Citation Povich, Mark, "Model and World: Generalizing the Ontic Conception of Scientific Explanation" (2017). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1140. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1140 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program Dissertation Examination Committee: Carl F. Craver, Chair Stuart Glennan John Heil Ron Mallon Anya Plutynski Model and World: Generalizing the Ontic Conception of Scientific Explanation by Mark Adam Povich A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2017 St. Louis, Missouri © 2017, Mark Adam Povich Table of Contents Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................iii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION........................................................................................iv Chapter 1. Introduction: Brief Historical Positioning......................................................................1 Chapter 2. Mechanistic Explanation in Psychology......................................................................14 Chapter 3. Mechanisms and Model-based fMRI...........................................................................36 Chapter 4. Minimal Models and the Generalized Ontic Conception of Scientific Explanation....52 Chapter 5. Information and Explanation: A Dilemma...................................................................77 Chapter 6. Social Knowledge and Supervenience Revisited.........................................................93 Chapter 7. The Directionality of Distinctively Mathematical Explanations................................106 Chapter 8. Conclusion and Future Work......................................................................................127 References....................................................................................................................................130 ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank Andre Ariew, Mike Dacey, Dylan Doherty, Stuart Glennan, John Heil, Eric Hochstein, Philippe Huneman, Daniel Kostic, Ron Mallon, Joe McCaffrey, Christiane Merritt, Gualtiero Piccinini, Anya Plutynski, Rick Shang, Kate Shrumm, Julia Staffel, Catherine Stinson, Dan Weiskopf, David Wright, Tom Wysocki, and audience members at the 2014 and 2016 Philosophy of Science Association conferences and the 2014 SLAPSA conference for feedback on various parts of this work. I would also like to thank my department secretaries Mindy Danner, Sue McKinney, Kimberly Mount, and Dee Stewart. Finally, for financial, emotional, and philosophical support and friendship, I would like to thank my advisor, Carl Craver. Mark Povich Washington University in St. Louis May 2017 iii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Model and World: Generalizing the Ontic Conception of Scientific Explanation by Mark Adam Povich Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Washington University in St. Louis, 2017 Professor Carl F. Craver, Chair Model and World defends a theory of scientific explanation that I call the “Generalized Ontic Conception” (GOC), according to which a model explains when and only when it provides (approximately) veridical information about the ontic structures on which the explanandum phenomenon depends. Causal and mechanistic explanations are species of GOC in which the ontic structures on which the explanandum phenomenon depends are causes and mechanisms, respectively, and the kinds of dependence involved are causal and constitutive/mechanistic, respectively. The kind of dependence relation about which information is provided determines the species of the explanation. This provides an intuitive typology of explanations and opens the possibility for non-causal, non-mechanistic explanations that provide information about non- causal, non-mechanistic kinds of dependence (Pincock 2015; Povich forthcoming a). What unites all these forms of explanation is that, by providing information about the ontic structures on which the explanandum phenomenon depends, they all can answer what-if-things-had-been- different questions (w-questions) about the explanandum phenomenon. This is what makes causal explanations, mechanistic explanations, and non-causal, non-mechanistic explanations all explanations. iv Furthermore, GOC is a generalized ontic conception of scientific explanation (Salmon 1984, 1989; Craver 2014). It is consistent with Craver's claim that (2014), according to the ontic conception, commitments to ontic structures (like causes or mechanisms) are required to demarcate explanation from other scientific achievements. GOC demarcates explanatory from non-explanatory models in terms of ontic structures. For example, the distinction between explanatory and phenomenal models is cashed out in terms of the ontic structures about which information is conveyed: A phenomenal model provides information about the explanandum phenomenon, but not the ontic structures on which it depends. GOC is generalized because it says that commitments to more of the ontic than just the causal-mechanical – the traditional focus of the ontic conception – are required adequately to achieve this demarcation; attention to all ontic structures on which the explanandum depends is required. The relation between model and world required for explanation is elaborated in terms of information rather than mapping, reference, description, or similarity (Craver and Kaplan 2011; Kaplan 2011; Weisberg 2013). The latter concepts prove too strong, so will not count models as explanatory that in fact are. Take Kaplan and Craver's (2011) model-to-mechanism-mapping (3M) principle. According to 3M, the variables in a mechanistic explanatory model must map to specific structural components and causal interactions of the explanandum phenomenon's mechanism. However, you can mechanistically explain without referring to the explanandum's mechanism or its components and their activities, for example, by describing what the mechanism is not like. This is a way of constraining or conveying information about a mechanism without actually mapping to, referring to, describing, representing, or being similar to it. v Chapter 1. Introduction: Brief Historical Positioning Salmon (1989) began his authoritative history of scientific explanation with Hempel and Oppenheim's “Studies in the Logic of Explanation,” published in 1948. If we follow Salmon in so dating the birth of the philosophical study of scientific explanation, then we are now nearing the end of its seventh decade. What lessons can we draw from the intervening three decades between Salmon's study and today? The central idea of this dissertation is that a wrong turn was made during the third decade, solidified in the fourth, and down which we have traveled to this day. In this introductory chapter, I will explain why this turn was made and how to get back on the right path, which, it turns out, is not so far away. According to Hempel and Oppenheim's (1948) account, which was to become known as the deductive-nomological (DN) model, an explanation is an argument with descriptions of at least one law of nature and antecedent conditions as premises and a description of the explanandum phenomenon, the thing to be explained, as the conclusion. On this view, to explain is to show that the explanandum phenomenon is predictable on the basis of at least one law of nature and certain specific antecedent and boundary conditions. The DN model soon became the received theory of scientific explanation, one of two “grand traditions” (Salmon 1990), although it always had critics. An early critic was Scriven (1958), who was to start the second “grand tradition,” according to which explaining a phenomenon is identifying its cause(s). The first tradition, according to Salmon (1989; 1990), lives on in unificationism (Friedman, 1974; Kitcher 1989). The basic idea behind unificationism is that explaining an event is deriving a description of it from an argument pattern that can be used to derive descriptions of many different phenomena. This unifies the explanandum 1 phenomenon with the other phenomena that are derivable by the same argument pattern, thereby showing it to be part of a more general pattern of phenomena. The second tradition lives on in mechanistic approaches (Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005; Craver 2006; Glennan 2002; Kaplan 2011; Machamer, Darden, and Craver 2000) and causal/difference-making approaches (Strevens 2008; Woodward 2003; Woodward and Hitchcock 2003) to explanation. In the intervening three decades since Salmon published Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, I think it is safe to say that more philosophers have
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