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

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks QA273.A35 L364 2017 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    Oxford studies in philosophy of science [More in this series]
    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?
    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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