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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Ecological Laws And Their Promise Of Explanations, Viorel Pâslaru
Ecological Laws And Their Promise Of Explanations, Viorel Pâslaru
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Marcel Weber (1999) argued that the principle of competitive exclusion is a law of ecology that could explain phenomena (1) by direct application, or (2) by describing default states. Since he did not offer an account of explanation by direct application of laws, I offer an interpretation of explanation by direct application of laws based on a proposal by Elgin and Sober (2002). I show that in both cases it is the descriptions of mechanisms that explain phenomena, and not the laws. Lev Ginzburg and Mark Colyvan (2004) argued Malthus’ Law of Exponential Growth is the first law of ecology, …
Philosophy, Medicine And Health Care - Where We Have Come From And Where We Are Going, Michael Loughlin, Robyn Bluhm, Jonathan Fuller, Stephen Burtow, Rose E. G. Upshur, Kirstin Borgerson, Maya J. Goldenberg, Elselijn Kingma
Philosophy, Medicine And Health Care - Where We Have Come From And Where We Are Going, Michael Loughlin, Robyn Bluhm, Jonathan Fuller, Stephen Burtow, Rose E. G. Upshur, Kirstin Borgerson, Maya J. Goldenberg, Elselijn Kingma
Philosophy Faculty Publications
The role of philosophy in discussions of clinical practice was once regarded by many as restricted to a very limited version of ‘medical ethics’, one that has been extensively criticized in the pages of this journal and elsewhere for being at once philosophically untenable and practically unhelpful [1–4]. While this uninspiring view of the nature and scope of applied philosophy has by no means been eradicated, over a number of years there has been a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of medicine and health care as an intellectually serious and practically significant enterprise. Controversies about evidence, value, clinical knowledge, …
An Intervening Cause Counterexample To Railton’S Dnp Model Of Explanation, Stuart Gluck, Steven Gimbel
An Intervening Cause Counterexample To Railton’S Dnp Model Of Explanation, Stuart Gluck, Steven Gimbel
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, nonpragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptiblet o a class of counterexamplesin volvingi nterveningc auses which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is ineffective in this case. However, we develop below a new version which overcomes these difficulties. Thus we claim that all of the models in this tradition, DNP included, have …