http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
The different sciences furnish us with a wide variety of explanations: some work at macroscopic scales, some work at microscopic scales, and some operate across different levels. How do these different explanatory levels relate to one another, and what is an explanatory level in the first place? Over the last fifty years, more and more philosophers--both reductionists and anti-reductionists - have no longer subscribed to the idea that the best explanation resides at the fundamental physical level. New challenges arise from the success of scientific explanations employing multi-level models which mix levels of explanation, from distinctive differences between levels structures in biology, cognitive science and social science, from the apparently radical reimagining of the explanatory role of spacetime in our current best theories of fundamental physics, and from the enduring mystery of how higher-level explanations are possible in the first place. These questions naturally connect to classic philosophical ways of thinking about the relations between levels: reduction, emergence and fundamentality. This volume presents a snapshot of cutting-edge research on explanatory levels, from their conceptual foundations to the details of how they are used in scientific practice.
Introduction: Levels of Explanation -- Part I Foundations of Explanatory Levels -- 1 Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General Framework -- 2 Antireductionism Has Outgrown Levels -- 3 How the Reductionist Should Respond to the Multiscale Argument, and What This Tells Us About Levels -- Part II Levels of Explanation in Causal Modelling -- 4 Exclusion Excluded -- 5 Interventionist Causal Exclusion and the Challenge of Mixed Models -- 6 From Multilevel Explanation to Downward Causation -- Part III Levels of Explanation in Higher-Level Sciences -- 7 Explanatory Levels in Living Organisms -- 8 From Analogies to Levels of Abstraction in Cognitive Neuroscience -- 9 Messy but Real Levels in the Social Sciences -- PART IV Levels of Explanation in Physics -- 10 Levels Worth Having: A View from Physics -- 11 Levels of Fundamentality in the Metaphysics of Physics -- 12 No Grounds for Effective Theories -- Part V Levels of Explanation in Mathematics and Metaphysics -- 13 Explanation in Descriptive Set Theory -- 14 A Dormitive Virtue Puzzle -- 15 The Explanatory Role Argument and the Metaphysics of Deterministic Chance -- Part VI How Are Explanatory Levels Possible? -- 16 Why Are There High-Level Regularities? -- 17 Why High-Level Explanations Exist -- 18 A Democracy of Laws -- End Matter
edited by Katie Robertson and Alastair Wilson.
Includes bibliographical references and index.