Jeroen Van Bouwel

Remote Causes, Bad Explanations?

Amidst both philosophers of science and social scientists (including historians) one finds people defending the thesis that explanations of particular facts should refer to proximate causes, or that explanations referring to remote causes are at least less-if they are any-good (e.g. Jon Elster, Paul Veyne, Michael Taylor, etc.). The idea is that any explanatory factor at a temporal remove from the fact to be explained, should be replaced by a factor closer to the fact. This close-grain preference is a matter of favoring explanations that provide the detailed mediating mechanisms in non-interrupted causal chains across time. The claims we want to defend in this paper are: (1) explanations of plain facts (as opposed to explanations of contrasts between facts) that invoke remote causes on top of proximate causes are often better than explanations that invoke only proximate causes; and. (2) explanations of contrasts between facts that invoke only proximate cause are often worthless: one has to invoke a remote cause in order to provide a minimally adequate contrastive explanation. The upshot of this is that the close-grain preference should be replaced with a more differentiated explanatory pluralism.

Explanatory pluralism in the medical sciences: Theory and practice

Explanatory pluralism is the view that the best form and level of explanation depends on the kind of question one seeks to answer by the explanation, and that in order to answer all questions in the best way possible, we need more than one form and level of explanation. In the first part of this article, we argue that explanatory pluralism holds for the medical sciences, at least in theory. However, in the second part of the article we show that medical research and practice is actually not fully and truly explanatory pluralist yet. Although the literature demonstrates a slowly growing interest in non-reductive explanations in medicine, the dominant approach in medicine is still methodologically reductionist. This implies that non-reductive explanations often do not get the attention they deserve. We argue that the field of medicine could benefit greatly by reconsidering its reductive tendencies and becoming fully and truly explanatory pluralist. Nonetheless, trying to achieve the right balance in the search for and application of reductive and non-reductive explanations will in any case be a difficult exercise.

Individualism and holism, reduction and pluralism: A comment on Keith Sawyer and Julie Zahle

Commenting on recent articles by Keith Sawyer and Julie Zahle, the author questions the way in which the debate between methodological individualists and holists has been presented and contends that too much weight has been given to metaphysical and ontological debates at the expense of giving attention to methodological debates and analysis of good explanatory practice. Giving more attention to successful explanatory practice in the social sciences and the different underlying epistemic interests and motivations for providing explanations or reducing theories (which ask for different kinds of explanatory information to be found on the social or on the individual level) might lead to real progress in the debate on methodological individualism, and away from the unending battles of (metaphysical) intuitions.Commenting on recent articles by Keith Sawyer and Julie Zahle, the author questions the way in which the debate between methodological individualists and holists has been presented and contends that too much weight has been given to metaphysical and ontological debates at the expense of giving attention to methodological debates and analysis of good explanatory practice. Giving more attention to successful explanatory practice in the social sciences and the different underlying epistemic interests and motivations for providing explanations or reducing theories (which ask for different kinds of explanatory information to be found on the social or on the individual level) might lead to real progress in the debate on methodological individualism, and away from the unending battles of (metaphysical) intuitions.

Towards Democratic Models of Science: Exploring the Case of Scientific Pluralism

Scientific pluralism, a normative endorsement of the plurality or multiplicity of research approaches in science, has recently been advocated by several philosophers (e.g., Stephen Kellert, Helen Longino, and C. Kenneth Waters 2006, Philip Kitcher 2001, Helen Longino 2013, Sandra Mitchell 2009, and Hasok Chang 2010). Comparing these accounts of scientific pluralism, one will encounter quite some variation. We want to clarify the different interpretations of scientific pluralism by showing how they incarnate different models of democracy, stipulating the desired interaction among the plurality of research approaches in different ways.Furthermore, the example of scientific pluralism is used to advocate the application of democratic theory to philosophy of science problems in general. Drawing on the parallels between models of science and models of democracy, we can articulate how the plurality of research approaches in science should interact within a democratic framework as well as how to cultivate multiple research approaches in the epistemically most productive way possible. This will not only improve our understanding of scientific plurality, but it can also help us stipulating how different research approaches should interact to constitute the most objective account possible or how the ideal of scientific consensus has to be understood. Ultimately, developing democratic models of science bears on the question of how deeply science and democracy are entwined.

Pluralists About Pluralism? Different Versions of Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations.

Explanatory Strategies Beyond the Individualism/Holism Debate

Starting from the plurality of explanatory strategies in the actual practice of social scientists, I introduce a framework for explanatory pluralism – a normative endorsement of the plurality of forms and levels of explanation used by social scientists. Equipped with this framework, central issues in the individualism/holism debate are revisited, namely emergence, reduction and the idea of microfoundations. Discussing these issues, we notice that in recent contributions the focus has been shifting towards relationism, pluralism and interaction, away from dichotomous individualism/holism thinking and a winner-takes-all approach. Then, the challenge of the debate is no longer to develop the ultimate individualistic approach or defending the holist approach, but rather how to be combine individualism and holism; how can they co-exist, interact, be integrated or develop some division of labour, while making the best out of the strengths and limitations of the respective explanatory strategies of holists and individualists? Thus, the debate shifts to how exactly pluralism should be understood as the next leading question, going beyond the current individualism/holism debate. The paper ends with a discussion and evaluation of different understandings of explanatory pluralism defended in the literature.

Explicating Ways of Consensus-Making in Science and Society: Distinguishing the Academic, the Interface and the Meta-Consensus

In this chapter, we shed new light on the epistemic struggle between establishing consensus and acknowledging plurality, by explicating different ways of consensus-making in science and society and examining the impact hereof on their field of intersection, i.e. consensus conferences (in particular those organized by the National Institute of Health). We draw a distinction between, what we call, academic and interface consensus, to capture the wide appeal to consensus in existing literature. We investigate such accounts – i.e. from Miriam Solomon, John Beatty and Alfred Moore, and Boaz Miller – as to put forth a new understanding of consensus-making, focusing on the meta-consensus. We further defend how (NIH) consensus conferences enable epistemic work, through demands of epistemic adequacy and contestability, contrary to the claim that consensus conferences miss a window for epistemic opportunity (Solomon M, The social epistemology of NIH consensus conferences. In: Kincaid H, McKitrick J (ed) Establishing medical reality: methodological and metaphysical issues in philosophy of medicine. Springer, Dordrecht, 2007). Paying attention to the dynamics surrounding consensus, moreover, allows us to illustrate how the public understanding of science and the public use of the ideal of consensus could be well modified.

How to Study Scientific Explanation

This chapter investigates the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation discussed in Chap. 1: Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon. We argue that they do three things: (i) construct an explication in the sense of Rudolf Carnap, which then is used as a tool to make (ii) descriptive and (iii) normative claims about the explanatory practice of scientists. In Sect. 2.2—which has a preliminary character—we present Carnap’s view on what the task of explication is, on the requirements it has to satisfy and on its function. In Sect. 2.3 we show that Carl Hempel develops an explication of the concept of explanation and makes descriptive and normative claims with it. We also show that he fails to provide convincing arguments for these claims. In Sects. 2.4 and 2.5 we show that Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon had a similar working-method in their philosophical analysis of scientific explanation and failed at the same stage as Hempel: the arguments for the descriptive and normative claims are missing. We think it is the responsibility of current philosophers of explanation to go on where Hempel, Kitcher and Salmon failed. However, we should go on in a clever way. We call this clever way the “pragmatic approach to scientific explanation.” We clarify what this approach consists in and defend it in Sect. 2.6.

The Role of Unification in Explanations of Facts

In the literature on scientific explanation, there is a classical distinction between explanations of facts and explanations of laws. This paper is about explanations of facts. Our aim is to analyse the role of unification in explanations of this kind. With respect to this role, five positions can be distinguished:

Participation Beyond Consensus? Technology Assessments, Consensus Conferences and Democratic Modulation

Abstract In this article, we inquire into two contemporary participatory formats that seek to democratically intervene in scientific practice: the consensus conference and participatory technology assessment (pTA). We explain how these formats delegitimize conflict and disagreement by making a strong appeal to consensus. Based on our direct involvement in these formats and informed both by political philosophy and science and technology studies, we outline conceptions that contrast with the consensus ideal, including dissensus, disclosure, conflictual consensus and agonistic democracy. Drawing on the notion of meta-consensus and a distinction between four models of democracy (aggregative, deliberative, participatory and agonistic), we elaborate how a more positive valuation of conflict provides opportunities for mutual learning, the articulation of disagreement, and democratic modulation—three aspirations that are at the heart of most pTAs and consensus conferences. Disclosing the strengths and weaknesses of these different models is politically and epistemically useful, and should therefore be an integral part of the development of participation theory and process in science and technology.