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Because without cause : non-causal explanation in science and mathematics / Marc Lange.
Author
Lange, Marc, 1963-
[Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2017]
©2017
Description
xxii, 489 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Availability
Available Online
Oxford Scholarship - Oxford University Press: Philosophy
Copies in the Library
Location
Call Number
Status
Location Service
Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks
QA273.A35 L364 2017
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Details
Subject(s)
Probabilities
—
Philosophy
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Conditional expectations (Mathematics)
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Science
—
Philosophy
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Mathematics
—
Philosophy
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Series
Oxford studies in philosophy of science
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Summary note
Not all scientific explanations work by describing causal connections between events or the world's overall causal structure. Some mathematical proofs explain why the theorems being proved hold. In this book, Marc Lange proposes philosophical accounts of many kinds of non-causal explanations in science and mathematics. These topics have been unjustly neglected in the philosophy of science and mathematics. One important kind of non-causal scientific explanation is termed explanation by constraint. These explanations work by providing information about what makes certain facts especially inevitable - more necessary than the ordinary laws of nature connecting causes to their effects. Facts explained in this way transcend the hurly-burly of cause and effect. Many physicists have regarded the laws of kinematics, the great conservation laws, the coordinate transformations, and the parallelogram of forces as having explanations by constraint. This book presents an original account of explanations by constraint, concentrating on a variety of examples from classical physics and special relativity. This book also offers original accounts of several other varieties of non-causal scientific explanation. Dimensional explanations work by showing how some law of nature arises merely from the dimensional relations among the quantities involved. Really statistical explanations include explanations that appeal to regression toward the mean and other canonical manifestations of chance. -- Provided by publisher.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references (pages 461-482) and index.
Contents
What makes a scientific explanation distinctively mathematical?
"There sweep great general principles which all the laws seem to follow"
The Lorentz Transformations and the structure of explanations by constraint
The parallelogram of forces and the autonomy of statics
Really statistical explanations and genetic drift
Dimensional explanations
Aspects of mathematical explanation : symmetry, salience, and simplicity
Mathematical coincidences and mathematical explanations that unify
Desargues's Theorem as a case study of mathematical explanation, existence, and natural properties
Mathematical coincidence and scientific explanation
What makes some reducible physical properties explanatory?
Show 8 more Contents items
ISBN
9780190269487 ((hardcover ; : alk. paper))
0190269480 ((hardcover ; : alk. paper))
9780197508671 ((softcover : alk. paper))
0197508677 ((softcover : alk. paper))
LCCN
2016010808
OCLC
956379140
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Because without cause : non-causal explanation in science and mathematics / Marc Lange.
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