Conversational processes and causal explanation.

Conversational Processes and Causal Explanation

Causal explanation takes place in and takes the form of conversation. Explanations are selected by questions and are thus governed by general rules of discourse. A conversational model of causal explanation is introduced that explicates social aspects of the explanation process by postulating that good explanations must be relevant to the focus of a why question, as well as being true. The noti...

Causal Explanation and Manipulation

Causal explanation proceeds by citing the causes of the explanandum. Any model of causal explanation requires a specification of the relation between cause and effect in virtue of which citing the cause explains the effect. In particular, it requires a specification of what it is for the explanandum to be causally dependent on the explanans and what types of things (broadly understood) the expl...

Naturalism and Causal Explanation

Causal and constitutive explanation compared

This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address...

Factors in Causal Explanation

The construction of explanations is a key process in human understanding, having many applications for internal tasks such as learning through to external tasks such as diagnosis and image interpretation. In this paper we introduce ve orthogonal dimensions along which any explanation task can be characterised and show how their identiication gives rise to a new model of explanation construction...