Explanation and Invariance in the Special Sciences

By James F. Woodward. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2000

292 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, History and Philosophy of Science, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48b47ed62305bb050c7bbd8a080ff196a8b472b1

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Citations in the corpus

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (2008, background): “5For a recent defense of the idea that this is how scientific laws must be conceptualised, consult [250].”
Why Attention is Not Explanation: Surgical Intervention and Causal Reasoning about Neural Models (2020, methodology): “Applied to explanation , the interven-tionist account (Woodward, 1997; Woodward, 2000; Woodward, 2001; Woodward, 2005) produces theories of causal explanation in which explananda and ex-planantia are connected via patterns of counterfactual causal dependence, which indicate invariant relations…”
Explanatory generalizations, part II: Plumbing explanatory depth (2003, methodology): “In this paper, we will provide such an account from within the framework of the manipulationist account of explanation presented in a companion paper (Woodward and Hitchcock 2003, hereafter referred to as EG1; see also Woodward 1997a, 2000).”
What Is a Mechanism? A Counterfactual Account (2002, background): “See Woodward 2000. way not to describe (1) as a law, but instead describes it as a nonfundamental and only approximate “empirical relationship” (Frautshi 1986, 179ff).”
Law and Explanation in Biology: Invariance Is the Kind of Stability That Matters (2001, background): “As Mitchell notes, these ideas are similar in a number of ways to ideas that I have defended elsewhere (see e.g., Woodward 1997, 2000).”
Précis of Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach (2008, background): “Discovering invariance laws, it is heavily argued (Kugler & Turvey 1987; Wigner 1970; Woit 2006; Woodward 2000; 2001), is scientific explanation.”