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The Roles of Possibility and Mechanism in Narrative Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Daniel G. Swaim
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Abstract

There is a fairly long-standing distinction between what are called the ideographic as opposed to nomothetic sciences. The nomothetic sciences, such as physics, offer explanations in terms of the laws and regular operations of nature. The ideographic sciences, such as natural history (or, more controversially, evolutionary biology), cast explanations in terms of narratives. This article offers an account of what is involved in offering an explanatory narrative in the historical (ideographic) sciences. I argue that narrative explanations involve two chief components: a possibility space and an explanatory causal mechanism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , December 2019 , pp. 858 - 868
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Special thanks to an audience at the KU Leuven workshop Historical and Scientific Explanation: Reexamining the Connection, especially Bendik Aaby, John Beatty, Hugh Desmond, Mary Morgan, Paul Roth, and Gunnar Schumann. My thanks to an udience at the PSA 2018 meeting, especially Stuart Glennan, Henk de Regt, and Derek Turner. Thanks to Charles Pence for comments on an earlier version of this article. Finally, thanks to Michael Weisberg for his patience in reading and giving comments on many versions of this article.

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