Ascriptions of truth give rise to an explanatory asymmetry. For instance, we accept ‘ is true because Rex is barking’ but reject ‘Rex is barking because is true’. Benjamin Schnieder and other philosophers have recently proposed a fresh explanation of this asymmetry : they have suggested that the asymmetry has a conceptual rather than a metaphysical source. The main business of this paper is to assess this proposal, both on its own terms and as an option for deflationists. I (...) offer a pair of objections to the proposal and defend them from counter-objections. To conclude, I discuss how else to explain the asymmetry, and set out the implications for deflationism and correspondence theories of truth. (shrink)

Ascriptions of truth give rise to an explanatory asymmetry. For instance, we accept ‘ is true because Rex is barking’ but reject ‘Rex is barking because is true’. Benjamin Schnieder and other philosophers have recently proposed a fresh explanation of this asymmetry: they have suggested that the asymmetry has a conceptual rather than a metaphysical source. The main business of this paper is to assess this proposal, both on its own terms and as an option for deflationists. I offer (...) a pair of objections to the proposal and defend them from counter-objections. To conclude, I discuss how else to explain the asymmetry, and set out the implications for deflationism and correspondence theories of truth. (shrink)

Is conceptual analysis required for reductive explanation? If there is no a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths, does reductive explanation of the phenomenal fail? We say yes . Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker say no.

This paper studies the notions of conceptual grounding and conceptual explanation (which includes the notion of mathematical explanation), with an aim of clarifying the links between them. On the one hand, it analyses complex examples of these two notions that bring to the fore features that are easily overlooked otherwise. On the other hand, it provides a formal framework for modeling both conceptual grounding and conceptual explanation, based on the concept of proof. Inspiration and analogies are (...) drawn with the recent research in metaphysics on the pair metaphysical grounding–metaphysical explanation, and especially with the literature in philosophy of science on the pair causality-causal explanation. (shrink)

This paper studies the notions of conceptual grounding and conceptual explanation (which includes the notion of mathematical explanation), with an aim of clarifying the links between them. On the one hand, it analyses complex examples of these two notions that bring to the fore features that are easily overlooked otherwise. On the other hand, it provides a formal framework for modeling both conceptual grounding and conceptual explanation, based on the concept of proof. Inspiration and analogies are (...) drawn with the recent research in metaphysics on the pair metaphysical grounding–metaphysical explanation, and especially with the literature in philosophy of science on the pair causality-causal explanation. (shrink)

Understanding the Nature of Law explores methodological questions about how best to explain law. Among these questions, one is central: is there something about law which determines how it should be theorized? This novel book explains the importance of conceptual explanation by situating its methods and goals in relation to, rather than in competition with, social scientific and moral theories of law.

According to conceptual reductive accounts, if properties of one domain can be conceptually reduced to properties of another domain, then the former properties are ontologically reduced to the latter properties. I will argue that conceptual reductive accounts face problems: either they do not recognise that many higher-level properties are correlated with multiple physical properties, or they do not clarify how we can discover new truthmakers of sentences about a higher-level property. Still, there is another way to motivate ontological (...) reduction, the truthmaker reductive explanations (TRE). TRE can be given by using resources from John Heil’s truthmaker theory and the a priori entailment view or the a posteriori entailment view. I will argue that we can give these truthmaker reductive explanations if there are various less-than-perfectly similar physical properties that can be the truthmakers of sentences about higher-level properties and the physical similarity between them can explain why an irreducible higher-level property is not needed. (shrink)

This paper studies internal (or intra-)mathematical explanations, namely those proofs of mathematical theorems that seem to explain the theorem they prove. The goal of the paper is a rigorous analysis of these explanations. This will be done in two steps. First, we will show how to move from informal proofs of mathematical theorems to a formal presentation that involves proof trees, together with a decomposition of their elements; secondly we will show that those mathematical proofs that are regarded (...) as having explanatory power all display an increase of conceptual complexity from the assumptions to the conclusion. (shrink)

The experience of embodiment may be studied using the rubber hand illusion. Little is known about the cognitive mechanism that elicits the feeling of embodiment. In previous models of the rubber hand illusion, bodily signals are processed sequentially. Such models cannot explain some more recent findings. Carruthers (2013) proposed a multidimensional model of embodiment, in which the processing of embodiment is understood in terms of conceptual hand space. Visual features of hands are represented along several dimensions. The rubber hand (...) illusion is then explained as the erroneous matching of the online representation of the artificial hand to the stored prototype in a space defined by those dimensions. We conducted the first experimental tests to investigate the multidimensional conceptual space account. First, participants performed a series of odd-one-out judgments for triads of hand images (including their own hand) and we then employed multidimensional scaling analyses. We found that a multidimensional model of perceived hand similarity could be fitted to our data. Second, we tested if a multisensory bodily signal manipulation (the rubber hand illusion) influences the position of the viewed artificial hand in hand space. We employed synchronous and asynchronous stroking and found that in the synchronous condition, which elicits the rubber hand illusion, compared to the asynchronous condition, which does not, the artificial hand was closer to the center of hand space; that is, to a prototype hand. We discuss these findings in the context of the Carruthers (2013) conceptual space model as well as other rubber hand illusion models. (shrink)

(1993). Two conceptual problems for the theory of Evolution: Causality and the explanation of emergence. World Futures: Vol. 38, Theoretical Achievements and Practical Applications of General Evolutionary Theory, pp. 123-129.

In this paper we attempt to identify which peer collaboration characteristics may be accountable for conceptual change through interaction. We focus on different socio‐cognitive aspects of the peer dialog and relate these with learning gains on the dyadic as well as the individual level. The scientific topic that was used for this study concerns natural selection, a topic for which students’ intuitive conceptions have been shown to be particularly robust. Learning tasks were designed according to the socio‐cognitive conflict instructional (...) paradigm. After receiving a short instructional intervention on natural selection, paired students were asked to collaboratively construct explanations for certain evolutionary phenomena while engaging in dialectical argumentation. Two quantitative coding schemes were developed, each with a different granularity. The first assessed discrete dialog moves that pertained to dialectical argumentation and to consensual explanation development. The second scheme characterized the dialog as a whole on a number of socio‐cognitive dimensions. Results from analyses on the dyadic as well as the individual level revealed that the engagement in dialectical argumentation predicted conceptual learning gains, whereas consensual explanation development did not. These findings open up new venues for research on the mechanisms of learning in and from peer collaboration. (shrink)

b is collection focuses on conceptual issues that arise within the theoretical dimension of psychiatry. In particular, the invited contributions centre on the nature of psychiatric classification and explanation by addressing important methodological issues. Two strategies are exemplified here. Either the authors directly contribute to foundational issues in psychiatry concerning the nature of psychiatric classification and explanation; or they provide a conceptual analysis that can play a role in developing adequate theories of specific psychiatric disorders.

This paper addresses a challenge proposed against non-mindreading explanations of infant spontaneous-response task data. The challenge is a foundational assumption of mindreading explanations best summed up by Carruthers : 141-172, 2013, Consciousness and Cognition, 36: 498-507, 2015) claim that only by appealing to a theory of mind is it possible to explain infant responses in spontaneous-response false-belief tasks when there are no one-to-one correspondences between observable behavior and mental states. Heyes, 131–143, 2014a, Developmental Science, 17, 647–659. b) responds (...) to this challenge arguing discrete stimuli is informationally wealthy, and interprets the spontaneous-response results in terms of low-level perceptual novelty. However, Scott and Baillargeon : 660-664, 2014) challenge Heyes’ explanation on the grounds that her account of spontaneous-response false-belief tasks cannot also explain spontaneous-response ignorance tasks. In response to this, an enactive, ecological goal-tracking explanation of spontaneous-response tasks is presented, and argued to be superior to both mindreading explanations and Heyes’ account. This is done by recasting perception and anticipation and appealing to the central role social normativity plays in constraining social cognition. Finally, it is argued the cognitivist framework that both Heyes and mindreading proponents appeal to, begs the question in favor of the indispensability of mental representations for explaining perception and anticipation. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam's doctrine of conceptual relativity sustains that there are many different incompatible, yet equivalent, descriptions of what have to be considered "the same" phenomena. This fact is reason to justify the idea that metaphysical realism is wrong and that a better general view of reality should be something like a "pragmatic realism." Putnam sustains further that the different incompatible and equivalent descriptions have to bear the same explanatory virtue. Here it is contended that there seems to be difficulties (...) in construing this requirement in a non-question begging way in an argument designed to show that metaphysical realism should be dismissed. Different descriptions can only be deemed to have the same explanative virtue if our knowledge of, for example, structures in the natural world, seems to be simply a form to "save the phenomena," but this is a characteristic anti-realist thesis that should not be taken for granted in the dialectical setting. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to show that formal analysis and reconstructions may be useful to discuss and shed light on substantive meta-theoretical issues. We proceed here by exemplification, analysing and reconstructing as a case study a paradigmatic biochemical theory, the Monod-Wyman-Changeux theory of allosterism, and applying the reconstruction to the discussion of some issues raised by prominent representatives of the new mechanist philosophy. We conclude that our study shows that at least in this case mechanicism and more traditional (...) accounts are not rivals but complementary approaches. (shrink)

Many contemporary metaphysicians believe that the existence of a contingent object such as Socrates metaphysically explains the existence of the corresponding set {Socrates}. This paper argues that this belief is mistaken. The argument proposed takes the form of a dilemma. The expression “{Socrates}” is a shorthand either for the expression “the set that contains all and only those objects that are identical to Socrates” or for the expression “the set that contains Socrates and nothing else”. However, Socrates' existence does not (...) explain the existence of the set that contains all and only those objects that are identical to Socrates, because there is such a set no matter whether or not Socrates exists. And although Socrates' existence does explain that of the set that contains Socrates and nothing else, this explanation is a conceptual rather than a metaphysical one. Both these claims rely on a deflationary account of the use of set theoretic vocabulary that is explained, though not properly justified, in the paper. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of political activity of persons. The purpose of the article is to study the positions of the value-cultural approach to explaining the factors of actualization and activation of the political activity of persons. The methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, generalization and abstraction, historical, structural functionalism are used. Factors of modernization, material well-being, high education level, presence of social connections, political culture, national identities, membership in voluntary associations, and (...) civil society are singled out. Established that the basis of political culture at the level of an individual is a psychological attitude to the role of one’s own “I” in the political sphere – a political attitude. It is emphasized that high political competence forces people to value democracy as a political system that provides an opportunity to realize their political attitudes; for them, democracy and a democratic political system is a value they willing to defend. Attention is drawn to the fact that a high level of education ensures the cultivation of active political attitudes, and access to resources (high income, participation in informal associations, the presence of a network of useful acquaintances) determines the success of political activity. The author comes to the conclusion that political activity is the implementing force of expressing of the value orientations of the person; its success, to the greatest extent, depends on social, intellectual, and financial capitals. The article has theoretical significance for research and interpretation of the phenomenon of political activity of persons. The achievements of the article can be applied to empirical research design. Further research may be aimed at considering other approaches. (shrink)

2.4 The Example: Infants and object-(im)permanence : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 17 2.4.1 Why a contentful account is warranted: Perspectival sensitivity : : : 17 2.4.2 The \searching under a cloth" and \AB" data : : : : : : : : : : : : 24 2.4.3 Two constraints on objectuality : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : (...) : 25.. (shrink)

On a view implicitly endorsed by many, a concept is epistemically better than another if and because it does a better job at ‘carving at the joints', or if the property corresponding to it is ‘more natural' than the one corresponding to another. This chapter offers an argument against this seemingly plausible thought, starting from three key observations about the way we use and evaluate concepts from en epistemic perspective: that we look for concepts that play a role in (...) class='Hi'>explanations of things that cry out for explanation; that we evaluate not only ‘empirical' concepts, but also mathematical and perhaps moral concepts from an epistemic perspective; and that there is much more complexity to the concept/property relation than the natural thought seems to presuppose. These observations, it is argued, rule out giving a theory of conceptual evaluation that is a corollary of a metaphysical ranking of the relevant properties. -/- conceptual ethics, explanation, naturalness, epistemic value, concept/property, semantic internalism. (shrink)

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are (...) able to abide by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise. (shrink)

We argue that the trend toward providing users with feasible and actionable explanations of AI decisions—known as recourse explanations—comes with ethical downsides. Specifically, we argue that recourse explanations face several conceptual pitfalls and can lead to problematic explanation hacking, which undermines their ethical status. As an alternative, we advocate that explanations of AI decisions should aim at understanding.

This paper argues for several related theses. First, the epistemological position that knowledge requires safe belief can be motivated by views in the philosophy of science, according to which good explanations show that their explananda are robust. This motivation goes via the idea—recently defended on both conceptual and empirical grounds—that knowledge attributions play a crucial role in explaining successful action. Second, motivating the safety requirement in this way creates a choice point—depending on how we understand robustness, we'll end (...) up with different conceptions of safety in epistemology. Lastly, and most controversially, there's an attractive choice at this point that will not vindicate some of the most influential applications of the safety-theoretic framework in epistemology, e.g., Williamson's arguments against the KK principle, and luminosity. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

I expand modal normativism, a theory of metaphysical modality, to give a normativist account of metaphysical explanation. According to modal normativism, basic modal claims do not have a descriptive function, but instead have the normative function of enabling language users to express semantic rules that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary. However, a worry for modal normativism is that it doesn’t keep up with all of the important and interesting metaphysics we can do by giving and evaluating metaphysical (...) class='Hi'>explanations. So, I advance modal normativism by arguing that metaphysical explanations also have a normative rather than descriptive function. In particular, non-causal explanatory claims have formal and semantic properties that make them expressively stricter than basic modal claims and so are better suited to express fine-grained aspects of semantic rules. A major payoff of my normativist account of metaphysical explanations is that it yields a plausible story about how we come to evaluate and know metaphysical explanations—we do this primarily by conceptual analysis. I also respond to a number of objections, including the objection that the epistemic payoffs of my view are not worth the metaphysical costs. (shrink)

This paper develops and draws the consequences of an etiological analysis of goal-directedness modeled on one that functions centrally in Charles Taylor's work on action. The author first presents, criticizes, and modifies Taylor's formulation, and then shows his modified formulation accounts easily for much of the fine-structure of teleological concepts and conceptualizations. Throughout, the author is at pains to show that teleological explanations are orthodox from an empiricist's point of view: they require nothing novel methodologically.

Analysis of online mathematics forums can help reveal how explanation is used by mathematicians; we contend that this use of explanation may help to provide an informal conceptualization of simplicity. We extracted six conjectures from recent philosophical work on the occurrence and characteristics of explanation in mathematics. We then tested these conjectures against a corpus derived from online mathematical discussions. To this end, we employed two techniques, one based on indicator terms, the other on a random sample of comments lacking (...) such indicators. Our findings suggest that explanation is widespread in mathematical practice and that it occurs not only in proofs but also in other mathematical contexts. Our work also provides further evidence for the utility of empirical methods in addressing philosophical problems. (shrink)

What features will something have if it counts as an explanation? And will something count as an explanation if it has those features? In the second half of the 20th century, philosophers of science set for themselves the task of answering such questions, just as a priori conceptual analysis was generally falling out of favor. And as it did, most philosophers of science just moved on to more manageable questions about the varieties of explanation and discipline-specific scientific explanation. Often, (...) such shifts are sound strategies for problem-solving. But leaving fallow certain basic conceptual issues can also result in foundational debates. (shrink)

Flexibility in conceptual projection constitutes one of the most challenging issues in the embodiment and conceptual metaphor literatures. We sketch a theoretical proposal that places the burden of the explanation on attentional dynamics in interaction with mental models in working memory that are constrained to be maximally coherent. A test of this theory is provided in the context of the conceptual projection of time onto the domain of space. Participants categorized words presented at different spatial locations (back–front, (...) left–right) as referring to the past or to the future. Responses were faster when the irrelevant word location was congruent with the back–past, front–future metaphoric mapping. Moreover, when a new highly task-relevant spatial frame of reference was introduced, it changed the projection of past and future onto space in a way that was congruent with the new frame (past was now projected to left space and future to right space), as predicted by the theory. This study shows that there is substantial flexibility in conceptual projection and opens a venue to study metaphoric variation across tasks, individuals, and cultures as the result of attentional dynamics. (shrink)

Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that explanation and categorization are intimately related. This paper explores the hypothesis that explanations can help structure conceptual representations, and thereby influence the relative importance of features in categorization decisions. In particular, features may be differentially important depending on the role they play in explaining other features or aspects of category membership. Two experiments manipulate whether a feature is explained mechanistically, by appeal to proximate causes, or functionally, by appeal to a function (...) or goal. Explanation type has a significant impact on the relative importance of features in subsequent categorization judgments, with functional explanations reversing previously documented effects of [”]causal status’. The findings suggest that a feature’s explanatory importance can impact categorization, and that explanatory relationships, in addition to causal relationships, are critical to understanding conceptual representation. (shrink)

There are at least two importantly different ways for a philosophical theory to account for something. Explanations account for why something exists or occurs or is the way it is. Explications account for what it is for something to exist or occur or be a certain way. Both explanation and explication do important philosophical work. I show what it takes to defend genuine philosophical explanations. The sort of explanation I am interested in is incompatible not only with eliminating (...) the target phenomenon, but also with reducing it to the explanans. I show how explication comes into play in determining whether some phenomenon can plausibly be given either a reductive or eliminative treatment. Explication helps us distinguish certain kinds of reductive and eliminative views, gives us a graded account of the philosophical cost of eliminations, and furnishes us with a certain limit upon what resources an eliminative view can plausibly claim. This last point exposes a defect in a family of eliminative views that seek to retain truths about what they eliminate. Before concluding, I offer a brief defense of common sense as a legitimate, though defeasible, source of philosophical evidence. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in metaphysical explanation, and philosophers have fixed on the notion of ground as the conceptual tool with which such explanation should be investigated. I will argue that this focus on ground is myopic and that some metaphysical explanations that involve the essences of things cannot be understood in terms of ground. Such ‘essentialist’ explanation is of interest, not only for its ubiquity in philosophy, but for its being in a sense (...) an ultimate form of explanation. I give an account of the sense in which such explanation is ultimate and support it by defending what I call the inessentiality of essence. I close by suggesting that this principle is the key to understanding why essentialist explanations can seem so satisfying. (shrink)

Medical explanations have often been thought on the model of biological ones and are frequently defined as mechanistic explanations of a biological dysfunction. In this paper, I argue that topological explanations, which have been described in ecology or in cognitive sciences, can also be found in medicine and I discuss the relationships between mechanistic and topological explanations in medicine, through the example of network medicine and medical genetics. Network medicine is a recent discipline that relies on (...) the analysis of various disease networks in order to find organizing principles in disease explanation. My aim is to show how topological explanations in network medicine can help solving the conceptual issues that pure mechanistic explanations of the genetics of disease are currently facing, namely the crisis of the concept of genetic disease, the progressive geneticization of diseases and the dissolution of the distinction between monogenic and polygenic diseases. However, I will also argue that topological explanations should not be considered as independent and radically different from mechanistic explanations for at least two reasons. First, in network medicine, topological explanations depend on and use mechanistic information. Second, they leave out some missing gaps in disease explanation that require, in turn, the development of new mechanistic explanations. Finally, I will insist on the specific contribution of topological explanations in medicine: they push us to develop an explanation of disease in general, instead of focusing on single explanations of individual diseases. This last point may have major consequences for biomedical research. (shrink)

The explanatory gap . Consciousness is a mystery. No one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states. Suppose that consciousness is identical to a property of the brain, say activity in the pyramidal cells of layer 5 of the cortex involving reverberatory circuits from cortical layer 6 to the thalamus and back to layers 4 and 6,as Crick and Koch have suggested for visual consciousness. .) (...) Still, that identity itself calls out for explanation! Proponents of an explanatory gap disagree about whether the gap is permanent. Some say that we are like the scientifically naive person who is told that matter = energy, but does not have the concepts required to make sense of the idea. If we can acquire these concepts, the gap is closable. Others say the gap is uncloseable because of our cognitive limitations. Still others say that the gap is a consequence of the fundamental nature of consciousness. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide an accessible introduction to the topic area of conceptual analysis of legal concepts and its methodology. I attempt to explain, at a fairly foundational level, what conceptual analysis is, how it is done and why it is important in theorizing about the law. I also attempt to explain how conceptual analysis is related to other areas in philosophy, such as metaphysics and epistemology. Next, I explain the enterprise of conceptual jurisprudence, as (...) concerned to provide an account of those properties that distinguish things that are law from things that are not law which constitute the former things as law, illustrating this explanation with what I hope are intuitive examples. Three different methodological approaches are also explained and evaluated. Finally, the practical importance of conceptual jurisprudence is discussed. (shrink)

We argue that explanations appealing to logical impossibilities are genuine explanations. Our defense is based on a certain picture of impossibility. Namely, that there are impossibilities and that the impossibilities have structure. Assuming this broad picture of impossibility we defend the genuineness of explanations that appeal to logical impossibilities against three objections. First, that such explanations are at odds with the perceived conceptual connection between explanation and counterfactual dependence. Second, that there are no genuinely contrastive (...) why-questions that involve logical impossibilities and, third, that explanations appealing to logical impossibilities rule nothing out. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealisedexplanation gamein which players collaborate to find the best explanation(s) for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal patterns of (...) variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a (conditionally) optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept (...) serves the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s well-known account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and thus is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts that include substantial gender-related psychological features, such as awareness of social expectations. Instead, our concept counts someone as being of a certain gender solely based on the person’s self-identification with this gender. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment by means of one’s gender identity. In this context, substantial psychological features and awareness of one’s social situation are involved. While previous accounts of concepts have focused on their role in determining extensions, we point to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important. (shrink)