Explanation and Understanding

Science has multiple goals: to describe the world, as it is now; to predict the future and to make inferences about the past. Science also aims to understand the world – to explain why it is the way it is. But what does it take to explain a phenomenon? How does science generate understanding and what does that take?

In this thorough and clearly written introduction to scientific explanation, Arnon Levy explores the following problems and questions:

• the background to the topic of scientific explanation, particularly the questions of what an explanation is, what makes a good explanation and why seek them in the first place
• empiricism about explanation: Hempel’s deductive-nomological model and its problems
• unificationism about explanation: must good scientific explanations fit into an overall ‘explanatory store’?
• causation and explanation: Lewis’s description-based model, Woodward’s interventionist view and Strevens’s criterion of selection theory
• connections between explanation and understanding
• models, idealization and explanation
• non-causal explanation and explanation in non-scientific contexts
• the nature of understanding.

Additional features, such as chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, make this an excellent resource for students of philosophy of science, metaphysics and epistemology.