滑铁卢大学Paul Thagard教授讲座：科学解释
日期：2015-05-12SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION
SPRING 2015 SHORT-COURSE
PAUL THAGARD
(University of Waterloo)
600 RENWEN BUILDING
Renmin University of China
9 a.m. – 12 p.m.
MAY 12, 2015
PHILOSOPHY AND EXPLANATION
Philosophy and science are interconnected attempts to understand the world, seeking to find and evaluate explanations of many kinds of facts, in fields that include physics, biology, medicine, economics, and history. The most straightforward explanatory style is narrative explanation, which tells stories about origins and developments.
MAY 13, 2015
EXPLANATION BY ELIMINATION AND BY DEDUCTION
Additional explanatory styles are commonly used in science. Explanation by elimination explains away apparent facts by rejecting the existence of presumed entities, such as gods, aether, phlogiston, qi, and sometimes even conscious minds. Deductive explanations are common in physics and economics and derive facts from general laws.
MAY 14, 2015
MECHANISTIC EXPLANATION AND EMERGENCE
In biology, medicine, and cognitive science, mechanistic explanations show how facts result from underlying mechanisms, which are systems of parts whose interactions produce regular changes. Mechanistic explanations have been very successful for life and disease, and show great promise for explaining mental facts using neural processes. Complex mechanisms have
emergent properties that belong to the whole but not to the parts because they result from the interactions of the parts.
