Dear All, This Wednesday at the HPS Philosophy Workshop, Robert Northcott will present a paper entitled: 'Scientific progress and sui generis explanations'. An abstract is included below.
As usual, the meeting takes place 1-2pm, at HPS on Free School Lane. All are welcome. Best wishes, Emily Abstract: I argue, against the literature, that often scientific progress does not feature or consist in any theoretical advance. Neither does it feature or consist in the discovery of new mechanisms or causal capacities. Rather, it is a matter of establishing causal explanations in a kind of case I label sui generis - where the explanation is specific to the particular explanandum and cannot usually be exported to other explananda. A characteristic feature of such explanations is that they go well beyond and cannot be derived from our current theories and mechanisms. Neither do they advance our stock of knowledge of those. Yet they constitute scientific progress nevertheless and moreover in sui generis cases are the only way such progress can be achieved. Furthermore, I argue that sui generis cases are common and that their ranks likely include some of the most important of all policy issues. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
