Explanation in Science: Causation, Unification and Pluralism (2 of 2)

This lecture looks at two accounts of explantion, the causation account and the unification account. After examinging problems with each, I consider the prospect that we can have a pluralistic, context-sensative acount of 'explanation'. That is, what counts as an explanation in one context might not count in another. This kind of contextualism is argued for by Peter Godfrey-Smith and Bas van Fraassen, but on different grounds.

[dylan]

I went through this playlist over the past week, just finished this final video. Thank you so much for producing something like this! Easy access, concise information like this is invaluable.

[igguma]

I can't believe I got this education for free. Incredible content in this series, thank you for providing such invaluable information to the interested individual.

[brendarua]

Thank you for this survey. I enjoyed revisiting these issues. If you ever do a part three, I hope you will consider looking into the role of statistics as explanation.

Correlation is all around us from our common sense observations to the majority of historical/observational sciences. I get a special kick out of stats 101 students saying "Correlation isn't causation" as if it is a mantra, and yet they can't unpack even the top layers of that statement. I believe there are some insights for your students and viewers in this.

[edwardrochester]

Thank you! Another brilliantly enlightening lecture :) Apart from fitting perectly into the course I'm doing, it's very insightful for me personally. The religious explanation you spoke about triggered my thoughts about how I might trying to ... explain .... to a sceptic, why a religious person, say, but not necessarily religious, might reach for explanations like "it was God's will" when confronted with some terrible experience such as bereavement. I would probably say it's what they do to help come to terms, achieve closure and solace.

Then I think, isn't much of the motivation for seeking explanations for what we see is similar? We want order, we want to identify some sort of "force majeure" that helps us feel more comfortable. Ancient civilisations did that, and they mde sacrifices to the Gods. In more recent times science has been about seeking physically mechanistic reasons for natural phenomena; historians look into event timelines to explain why wars happened, etc.
Whatever the psychology or motivation, I would not say the explanations are necessarily invalid

[mojoman]

Sysyphus Redeemed I have something I'd like to ask you. Regarding the Vienna School of the logical positivists, you mentioned in another lecture that they were skeptical if certain instruments could ever represent reality, and you mentioned electron microscopes. I understand the general movement and the people involved, but where and by who is that specifically mentioned? I would be very interested. Thank you!

[munstrumridcully]

I have a question: isn't the metric for what makes a "best" explanation in science the one with the greatest predictive power? For instance, isn't Relativity superior to Newtonian Mechanics because it has greater predictive power, like in planetary motion? How various fields build their models, and the tools they use may differ, but don't they all get judged(after first having their methodology inspected in peer review) by their predictive power?

[houmous]

2:45 "If we find causes that go back billions of years, then there seems to be something missing in such an account". Why? I don’t see any reason to dismiss this so lightly, in fact I can’t spot any clearly irrational element to it.

[rick]

Great videos! I certainly don't regret my recent subscription to your channel.

Regarding the content of the videos, I would add my 2 cents: I think it may be a mistake to try and define what an explanation is, because to me it seems apparent that there are different things that are all accepted as explanations in spite of these things being considerably different from one another.

The neurochemical explanation that you gave, for instance, is an example of that. You have a correlation between the balance of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, like serotonin, and your mood. That is, in a fact, an explanation, but one from correlation. It is not very satisfactory in my view because the chain of cause and consequence is very unclear to the person receiving the explanation. Now, if you have pavlovian conditioning for instance, one could also say that the reason dogs salivate when hearing a bell after conditioning is because they associated it with the smell of food. That is also an explanation of correlation, because the only "mechanistical undertone" of the explanation is the assumption that the dog made an association, which in fact can't be definitely proven. However, it is something so reasonable and so close to our own human experience that we find it much more acceptable than the neurochemical one. "We salivate when thinking of food and expecting food, why wouldn't dogs be the same?"

An explanation that does not stem from correlation is, for instance, why Pi measures 3, 14... etc. Pi measures that because Pi is defined in a certain way that makes its value fixed and consistent. I would say that is an "explanation by definition". "Pi is that because I defined it as so", which is a perfectly acceptable explanation as well, and has nothing to do with correlation.

Explanations of causation seem to be the ones that are considered the most powerful, but in truth they seem to be "refined" explanations of correlation, in the sense that you state explicitly the chain of cause and effect, making things clearer. When you say that two bodies attract each other because everything that has mass attracts each other, that is an explanation of correlation formed via induction. When you say that they attract each other because their masses bend space-time therefore bringing the objects "closer" to one another, you're giving a mechanistic explanation, an explanation of "causation". It seems more powerful because now it became clearer the relationship between "having mass" and "attracting each other", but in truth if you go just one step further you will see that you are not much better with that explanation. You could ask "why does mass bends space time?" or "why it bends in such a way as to bring things closer and not further apart?" etc.

Anyway, there are probably other different types of things that are considered explanations like the historian ones that I'm not thinking of right now, but they clearly seem to be different things. If someone asked me for a definition of the umbrella term "explanation", I would probably follow something in line with what Feyman once said in an interview - that you will eventually reach a point in all types of "why" questions that comes to "because the universe is like that", and that will have to do it. That's probably what encompasses all things that we call "explanations": they bring you one step closer to reach the fundamental properties of the universe. I actually do think this works for all things - I'm reminded that Aristotle considered the purpose of life to reach happiness or to be in a state of happiness, and that would answer the question "why do people do things in life?", but then you could ask "and why happiness and not any other thing?" etc. ultimately reaching the "because the universe is like that" sort of answer. So I think the goal of any explanation is to bring us closer and closer to the fundamental principles of the universe where we can't explain them in terms of other things. Explanations are our way to try and access the "basic rules of the universe" so to speak (not practically speaking, just as a working definition. Someone asking why you got late to work is not interested in accessing the "fundamental principles of the universe" lol).

[matthewtrevino]

Can you send some sources on contemporary contract theory. I've reading some interesting work on informatics using logical algebra to formulate contracts between many interconnected industries in communication.Its out of Oslo Sweden. If you message me back I'll send you some of the papers.