Cover: Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation, from Harvard University PressCover: Depth in PAPERBACK

Depth

An Account of Scientific Explanation

Product Details

PAPERBACK

Print on Demand

$38.00 • £33.95 • €34.95

ISBN 9780674062573

Publication Date: 09/30/2011

Short

536 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

16 line illustrations, 1 table

World

Add to Cart

Educators: Request an Exam Copy (Learn more)

Media Requests:

Related Subjects

What does it mean for scientists to truly understand, rather than to merely describe, how the world works? Michael Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientific explanation and understanding that overhauls and augments the familiar causal approach to explanation. What is replaced is the test for explanatorily relevant causal information: Strevens discards the usual criterion of counterfactual dependence in favor of a criterion that turns on a process of progressive abstraction away from a fully detailed, physical causal story. The augmentations include the introduction of a new, non-causal explanatory relevance relation—entanglement—and an independent theory of the role of black-boxing and functional specification in explanation.

The abstraction-centered notion of difference-making leads to a rich causal treatment of many aspects of explanation that have been either ignored or handled inadequately by earlier causal approaches, including the explanation of laws and other regularities, with particular attention to the explanation of physically contingent high-level laws, idealization in explanation, and probabilistic explanation in deterministic systems, as in statistical physics, evolutionary biology, and medicine.

The result is an account of explanation that has especially significant consequences for the higher-level sciences: biology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences.

Awards & Accolades

  • A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2009

Share This

A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think, by Caleb Everett, from Harvard University Press

Recent News

Black lives matter. Black voices matter. A statement from HUP »

From Our Blog

Jacket: Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, by Peter Wilson, from Harvard University Press

A Lesson in German Military History with Peter Wilson

In his landmark book Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, acclaimed historian Peter H. Wilson offers a masterful reappraisal of German militarism and warfighting over the last five centuries, leading to the rise of Prussia and the world wars. Below, Wilson answers our questions about this complex history,