Can I read Depth : An Account of Scientific Explanation on EtoBox?
Depth : An Account of Scientific Explanation by Michael Strevens is a science book available to read on EtoBox.
What is Depth : An Account of Scientific Explanation about?
<p>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.</p> <p>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
Who reads Depth : An Account of Scientific Explanation?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Michael Strevens
- Publisher
- Harvard University, Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies
- Published
- 2008
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780674062573
- Category
- science
- Subjects
- Science, Philosophy, Anthropology
- Rating
- 3.8 / 5 (5 ratings)
- Updated
- 2026-03-14