Explanation Beyond Causation

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Causal Information ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Wide Range

Explanations are very important to us in many contexts: in science, mathematics, philosophy, and also in everyday and juridical contexts. But what is an explanation? In the philosophical study of explanation, there is long-standing, influential tradition that links explanation intimately to causation: we often explain by providing accurate information about the causes of the phenomenon to be explained. Such causal accounts have been the received view of the nature of explanation, particularly in philosophy of science, since the 1980s. However, philosophers have recently begun to break with this causal tradition by shifting their focus to kinds of explanation that do not turn on causal information. The increasing recognition of the importance of such non-causal explanations in the sciences and elsewhere raises pressing questions for philosophers of explanation. What is the nature of non-causal explanations—and which theory best captures it? How do non-causal explanations relate to causal ones? How are non-causal explanations in the sciences related to those in mathematics and metaphysics? This volume of new essays explores answers to these and other questions at the heart of contemporary philosophy of explanation. The essays address these questions from a variety of perspectives, including general accounts of non-causal and causal explanations, as well as a wide range of detailed case studies of non-causal explanations from the sciences, mathematics and metaphysics.

scholarly journals Implicational generalizations in morphological syncretism: The role of communicative biases

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN STORME
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Probability Distributions ◽  
Detailed Case

Cross-linguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible, (ii) languages may prioritize these requirements differently, and (iii) probability distributions for grammatical features interacting in syncretic patterns are fixed across languages. More specifically, this approach predicts that grammatical contexts that are less probable or more informative about a target grammatical feature $ T $ should favor syncretism of $ T $ cross-linguistically. The paper provides evidence for these predictions based on four detailed case studies involving well-known patterns of contextual syncretism (gender syncretism based on number, gender syncretism based on person, aspect syncretism based on tense, and case syncretism based on animacy).

scholarly journals Variety of Economic Share of Tourism on Tropical Islands

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 303-314
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Podhorodecka
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Correlation Coefficient ◽  
Spearman Correlation ◽  
Tropical Islands ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Tropical Island ◽  
Positive Correlation ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Chi Square Test

Abstract The author seeks an answer to the question whether a higher intensity of tourism movement is connected with a higher share of tourism in the economy in selected tropical island territories. With the use of the Spearman correlation coefficient, the existence of the average positive correlation between the intensity of tourism movement and the share of tourism in the economy has been determined. In the second part of paper, the author looks at the conditions which affect the role of tourism in the economy in proportion to the intensity of tourism movement. For this purpose, the Chi-square test and detailed case studies of chosen tropical islands are discussed.

Case Studies of PTC-Preventable Accidents

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dave Schlesinger
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Human Factor ◽  
Transportation Safety ◽  
Train Control ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Train Control System ◽  
Safety Improvement ◽  
Positive Train Control

A 1969 collision of two Penn Central train resulted in four fatalities and forty-five injuries. This accident could have been prevented, had some type of train control system been in place. After this accident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) asked the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to study the feasibility of requiring railroads to install some type of automatic train control system that would prevent human-factor caused accidents. Over the next almost four decades, a number of additional accidents occurred, culminating in the January, 2005 Graniteville Norfolk-Southern accident and the September, 2008 Metrolink Chatsworth accident. A little more than one month after the Metrolink accident, Congress passed the Rail Safety Improvement Act, which requires Positive Train Control (PTC). To better explain the positive train control requirements, this paper traces each to a detailed case study. Four different accidents are studied, each being an example of one of the four, core positive train control requirements. Included in the case study is a discussion about how positive train control would have prevented the accident, had it been present. This provides positive train control implementers and other railroad professionals with a better understanding of the factors that have caused or contributed to the cause of the positive train control preventable accidents studied.

scholarly journals Commercial Foot Soldiers of the Empire: Foreign Merchant Politics in Tampico, Mexico, 1861-1866

1990 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-314
Author(s):  
John D. French
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Current Literature ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Central Arena ◽  
Foreign Merchants

During the period from Mexican independence in 1821 to the end of the French intervention in 1867, Mexico's primary tie to the outside world was based on trade. The foreign merchants, who monopolized this activity, played a crucial role in the economic, diplomatic, and political life of Mexico. The current literature on these nineteenth century merchants includes studies of foreign groups, such as the French, detailed case studies of individual entrepreneurs, firms and merchant families, and one work that provides a unique state-centered perspective on the Mexican/merchant nexus. None, however, have tried to conceptualize the role of foreign merchants as a whole, across national lines and individual rivalries, in the port cities that were the central arena of contact and conflict with the outside world.

From the East River to the Sea

Arab New York ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-144
Author(s):  
Emily Regan Wills
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Arab Americans ◽  
Muslim American ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
East River ◽  
Activist Groups

This chapter documents the diversity within Arab-led activism for Palestinians, through detailed case studies of two different activist groups, Adalah-NY and Al-Awda NY. While Al-Awda draws its membership and discourses from the recently-immigrated communities of New York and New Jersey, Adalah-NY is oriented towards international discourses of solidarity and social justice. The different ways that identities (such as Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, American, and Jewish) are used by these organizations represent different responses to the problems of political engagement that Arab Americans and their political allies face.

Everyday Style

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Film Style ◽  
Positive Representations ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
The Way

Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.

XXI: Mortality in Magherafelt, County Derry, in the early eighteenth century reappraised

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (89) ◽  
pp. 50-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Macafee ◽  
Valerie Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Historical Demography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Tax Returns ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Patterns

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.

scholarly journals Avoiding Negligence and Profusion: The Failure of the Joint-Stock Form in the Anglo-Indian Tea Trade, 1840–1870

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL ALDOUS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Agency Costs ◽  
Fixed Capital ◽  
Firm Boundaries ◽  
Agency Model ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Anglo Indian ◽  
Indian Tea

In the nineteenth century, firms operating in the Anglo-Indian tea trade were organized using a variety of ownership forms, including partnership, joint-stock, and a combination of the two, known as the managing agency. Faced with both an increasing need for fixed capital and high agency costs caused by the distance between owners and managers, the firms adapted and increasingly adopted the hybrid managing agency model to overcome these problems. Using new data from Calcutta and Bengal Commercial Registers and detailed case studies of the Assam Company and Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., this article demonstrates that British entrepreneurs did not see the choice of ownership as a dichotomy or firm boundaries as fixed, but instead drew innovatively on the strengths of different forms of ownership to compete and grow successfully.

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