•  103
    This article has three aims. The first is to give a partial explication of the concept of unification. My explication will be partial because I confine myself to unification of particular events, because I do not consider events of a quantitative nature, and discuss only deductive cases. The second aim is to analyze how unification can be reached. My third aim is to show that unification is an intellectual benefit. Instead of being an intellectual benefit unification could be an intellectual har…Read more
  •  191
    Scientific Explanation
    with Jeroen Van Bouwel and Leen De Vreese
    Springer. 2013.
    When scientist investigate why things happen, they aim at giving an explanation. But what does a scientific explanation look like? In the first chapter (Theories of Scientific Explanation) of this book, the milestones in the debate on how to characterize scientific explanations are exposed. The second chapter (How to Study Scientific Explanation?) scrutinizes the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation, Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon and shows what went wron…Read more
  •  116
    In the literature on scientific explanation, there is a classical distinction between explanations of facts and explanations of laws. This paper is about explanations of facts. Our aim is to analyse the role of unification in explanations of this kind. We discuss five positions with respect to this role, argue for two of them and refute the three others.
  •  60
    One of the functions of scientific knowledge is to provide the theories and laws we need in order to understand the world. My article deals with the epistemic aspect of understanding, i.e., with understanding as unification. The aim is to explicate what we have to do in order to make our scientific knowledge contribute to an increase of the degree to which the particular events we have observed, fit into our world-picture. The analysis contains two parts. First I define the concept of scientific…Read more
  •  1
    Introduction
    Logique Et Analyse 47 (2): 231-234. 2004.
  •  23
    Inleidend overzicht van het wetenschapsfilosofische denken van vijftien hedendaagse filosofen.
  •  21
    Logic, Reasoning, and Rationality (edited book)
    with Joke Meheus and Dietlinde Wouters
    Springer. 2014.
    This book contains a selection of the papers presented at the Logic, Reasoning and Rationality 2010 conference in Ghent. The conference aimed at stimulating the use of formal frameworks to explicate concrete cases of human reasoning, and conversely, to challenge scholars in formal studies by presenting them with interesting new cases of actual reasoning. According to the members of the Wiener Kreis, there was a strong connection between logic, reasoning, and rationality and that human reasoning …Read more
  •  50
    Explanatory pluralism in the medical sciences: Theory and practice
    with Leen De Vreese and Jeroen Van Bouwel
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (5): 371-390. 2010.
    Explanatory pluralism is the view that the best form and level of explanation depends on the kind of question one seeks to answer by the explanation, and that in order to answer all questions in the best way possible, we need more than one form and level of explanation. In the first part of this article, we argue that explanatory pluralism holds for the medical sciences, at least in theory. However, in the second part of the article we show that medical research and practice is actually not full…Read more
  •  14
    Conceptual analysis of causation and theoretical utility in everyday contexts
    with Leen De Vreese
    Logique Et Analyse 52 (206): 177-190. 2009.
    In this paper we elaborate Ned Hall's theoretical utility perspective for causation in everyday contexts. We do this by presenting some instances of it, thereby adding some flesh to the skeleton that Hall has provided. Our elaboration of the theoretical utility perspective also provides arguments for it: the instances we present show the fruitfulness of the approach. A question raised by Hall's proposal is: should we give up descriptive analysis of causation (and descriptive analysis in general)…Read more
  •  107
    The Covering Law Model Applied to Dynamical Cognitive Science: A Comment on Joel Walmsley
    with Raoul Gervais
    Minds and Machines 21 (1): 33-39. 2011.
    In a 2008 paper, Walmsley argued that the explanations employed in the dynamical approach to cognitive science, as exemplified by the Haken, Kelso and Bunz model of rhythmic finger movement, and the model of infant preservative reaching developed by Esther Thelen and her colleagues, conform to Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim’s deductive-nomological model of explanation (also known as the covering law model). Although we think Walmsley’s approach is methodologically sound in that it starts with an…Read more
  •  39
    Explanation And Thought Experiments In History
    with Tim De Mey
    History and Theory 42 (1): 28-38. 2003.
    Although interest in them is clearly growing, most professional historians do not accept thought experiments as appropriate tools. Advocates of the deliberate use of thought experiments in history argue that without counterfactuals, causal attributions in history do not make sense. Whereas such arguments play upon the meaning of causation in history, this article focuses on the reasoning processes by which historians arrive at causal explanations. First, we discuss the roles thought experiments …Read more
  •  49
    In the literature on scientific explanation, there is a classical distinction between explanations of facts and explanations of laws. This paper is about explanations of laws, more specifically mechanistic explanations of laws. We investigate whether providing unificatory information in mechanistic explanations of laws has a surplus value. Unificatory information is information about how the mechanism that explains the law which is our target relates to other mechanisms. We argue that providing …Read more
  •  79
    Unification, the answer to resemblance questions
    Synthese 194 (9): 3501-3521. 2017.
    In the current literature on scientific explanation unification became unfashionable in favour of causal approaches. We want to bring unification back into the picture. In this paper we demonstrate that resemblance questions do occur in scientific practice and that they cannot be properly answered without unification. Our examples show that resemblance questions about particular facts demand what we call causal network unification, while resemblance questions about regularities require what we c…Read more
  •  29
    Indispensability Arguments in Favour of Reductive Explanations
    with Jeroen Van Bouwel and Leen De Vreese
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (1): 33-46. 2011.
    Instances of explanatory reduction are often advocated on metaphysical grounds; given that the only real things in the world are subatomic particles and their interaction, we have to try to explain everything in terms of the laws of physics. In this paper, we show that explanatory reduction cannot be defended on metaphysical grounds. Nevertheless, indispensability arguments for reductive explanations can be developed, taking into account actual scientific practice and the role of epistemic inter…Read more
  •  27
    On the Structure and Epistemic Value of Function Ascriptions in Biology and Engineering Sciences
    with Dingmar van Eck and Julie Mennes
    Foundations of Science 24 (3): 559-581. 2019.
    In this paper we chart epistemological similarities between shared function talk in biology and the engineering sciences, focusing on the notions of biological advantage function and technical advantage function. We start by showing that biological advantage function ascriptions are common in biology and that technical advantage function ascriptions are common in engineering science. We then proceed to show that these ascriptions have a very similar structure and that their epistemic value also …Read more
  •  5
    Explaining Laws by Reduction
    In A. Rojszczak, J. Cachro & G. Kurczewski (eds.), Philosophical Dimensions of Logic and Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 109--116. 2003.
  • Langage et méthode négatifs chez Albert le Grand
    Revue des Sciences Philosophiques Et Théologiques 65 (1): 75. 1981.
  •  72
  •  30
    Introduction
    with Dietlinde Wouters and Joke Meheus
    Philosophica 86 (4): 319-322. 2012.
    This introduction clarifies the ideas behind the Logic, Reasoning and Rationality congress from which the papers in this issue are selected. These ideas are situated in the history of 20th century philosophy (Vienna Circle, Kuhn, ...). We also give an overview of the papers in this issue
  •  26
    Inferential explanations in biology
    with Raoul Gervais
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3): 356-364. 2013.
    Among philosophers of science, there is now a widespread agreement that the DN model of explanation is poorly equipped to account for explanations in biology. Rather than identifying laws, so the consensus goes, researchers explain biological capacities by constructing a model of the underlying mechanism.We think that the dichotomy between DN explanations and mechanistic explanations is misleading. In this article, we argue that there are cases in which biological capacities are explained withou…Read more
  •  62
    Causality and Explanation in the Sciences
    Theoria 27 (2): 133-136. 2012.
    Editors’ introduction to the special issue on the Causality and Explanation in the Sciences conference, held at the University of Ghent in September 2011.
  •  60
    Plausibility versus richness in mechanistic models
    with Raoul Gervais
    Philosophical Psychology 26 (1): 139-152. 2013.
    In this paper we argue that in recent literature on mechanistic explanations, authors tend to conflate two distinct features that mechanistic models can have or fail to have: plausibility and richness. By plausibility, we mean the probability that a model is correct in the assertions it makes regarding the parts and operations of the mechanism, i.e., that the model is correct as a description of the actual mechanism. By richness, we mean the amount of detail the model gives about the actual mech…Read more
  •  44
    In the past 25 years, many philosophers have endorsed the view that the practical value of causal knowledge lies in the fact that manipulation of causes is a good way to bring about a desired change in the effect. This view is intuitively very plausible. For instance, we can predict a storm on the basis of a barometer reading, but we cannot avoid the storm by manipulating the state of the barometer (barometer status and storm are effects of a common cause, viz. atmospheric conditions). In §1 we …Read more