Deconstructing Explanation by Mechanism

Mechanism and Biological Explanation

This article argues that the basic account of mechanism and mechanistic explanation, involving sequential execution of qualitatively characterized operations, is itself insufficient to explain biological phenomena such as the capacity of living organisms to maintain themselves as systems distinct from their environment. This capacity depends on cyclic organization, including positive and negati...

Explanation Chains: Recommendations by Explanation

Given a set of candidate items, Recommendation by Explanation constructs a justification for recommending each item, in the form of what we call an Explanation Chain, and then recommends those candidates that have the best explanations. By unifying recommendation and explanation, this approach enables us to find relevant recommendations with explanations that have a high degree of both fidelity...

An explanation mechanism for bayesian inferencing systems

Explanation facilities are a particularly important feature of expert system frameworks. It is an area in which traditional rule-based expert system frameworks have had mixed results. While explanations about control are well handled, facilities are needed for generating be. tter explanations concerning knowledge base content. This pap41r approaches the explanation problem by examining the effe...

Explanation: Mechanism, Modularity, and Situated Cognition 1

The situated cognition movement has emerged in recent decades (although it has roots in psychologists working earlier in the 20 century including Vygotsky, Bartlett, and Dewey) largely in reaction to an approach to explaining cognition that tended to ignore the context in which cognitive activities typically occur. Fodor’s (1980) account of the research strategy of methodological solipsism, acc...

Ecological Explanation between Manipulation and Mechanism Description