Three Ways of Explaining It

Ways of Explaining Properties

Most explanations are either about events (why things happen), or about properties (why objects have the enduring characteristics that they do). Explanations of events have been studied extensively in philosophy and psychology, whereas the explanations of properties have received little or no attention in the literature. The present study is an exploration of the ways in which we explain variou...

ESSAY Explaining IT

In April of 2001, I sat on the roof of an office building in Bangalore listening to Metallica covers sung by a band made up of IT (Information Technology) professionals in their twenties. My new friends regaled me with stories of their success, boasting of their enormous salaries and summer homes under construction in the countryside. To them, this rooftop party represented the end of a long In...

Explaining Information Technology Users' Ways of mitigating Technostress

Technostress refers to the inability of an individual to deal with information technology (IT) in a healthy manner. Researchers, practitioners, and medical professionals have emphasized the omnipresence of technostress and its severe outcomes, including poor well-being and burnout. Despite the importance of the phenomenon, prior research has paid limited attention to how technostress can be mit...

Ways of Explaining Sexual Harassment: Motivating, Enabling and Legitimizing Processes

Emergent biological principles and the computational properties of the universe: Explaining it or explaining it away

PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND T he term emergence is used to describe the appearance of new properties that arise when a system exceeds a certain level of size or complexity, properties that are absent from the constituents of the system. It is a concept often summed up by the phrase that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and it is a key notion in the burgeoning field of complexity s...