Abstract:
In the last few decades, several very sophisticated philosophical accounts of causal explanation have been developed. According to these accounts causal explanations appeal to causal processes and relations that produce phenomena which we want to explain. However, recently ideas about non-causal explanations started to emerge, according to which these explanations do not appeal to causal processes or microphysical details of physical systems, but rather to mathematical properties and structures or to metaphysical relations (realization, supervenience, constitution, emergence). Given that every physical system is a part of the larger causal structure where every property or behavior is seen as an effect that has some causes and causal history, then how could the non-causal facts (mathematical properties and structures, or metaphysical dependency relations) be explanatory of physical systems if they don’t appeal to causes, causal histories or microphysical details? Thus, the central question on which I focus is: Is there a set of epistemic norms that can be universally applied to both causal and non-causal explanations?
Speaker:
Dr. Daniel Kostić is currently a postdoc at the University Bordeaux Montaigne. From 2016 until 2018, he was the Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the IHPST (CNRS/University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). The topic of his Marie Curie project was the philosophical foundations of topological explanations. The overarching theme of his research is understanding the scientific explanation. He has publications in three different areas of philosophy (philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and metaphysics of science). He is currently co-editing (with Claus Hilgetag and Marc Tittgemeyer) a special issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, on the topic of “Unifying the essential concepts of biological networks”