Explanatory Pluralism

C. Mantzavinos is Professor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Athens. He has previously taught at Witten/Herdecke University, the University of Freiburg, the University of Bayreuth and Stanford University, and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris. He is the author of Wettbewerbstheorie (1994), Individuals, Institutions, and Markets (Cambridge, 2001) and Naturalistic Hermeneutics (Cambridge, 2005), and the editor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2009).

'C. Mantzavinos raises fundamental questions about what a philosophical theory of explanation should do, and he offers a highly original and illuminating approach to the tasks he singles out as important. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of science.' Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York

• 1. Introduction; 2. The wrong question: what is an explanation?; 3. A brief outlook on the social sciences; 4. Towards explanatory pluralism; 5. The explanatory enterprise; 6. The rules of the explanatory game; 7. The plurality of explanatory games; 8. Explanatory activity as problem solving activity; 9. Explanatory rules as shared rules; 10. Normative appraisal: a procedural conception; 11. Explanatory methodology as technology; 12. Epilogue.