Explanatory Pluralism - Hardcover

Mantzavinos, C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 110712851X ISBN 13: 9781107128514

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Explaining phenomena is one of the main activities in which scientists engage. This book proposes a new philosophical theory of scientific explanation by developing and defending the position of explanatory pluralism with the help of the notion of 'explanatory games'. Mantzavinos provides a descriptive account of the explanatory activity of scientists in different domains and shows how they differ from commonsensical explanations offered in everyday life by ordinary people and also from explanations offered in religious contexts. He also shows how an evaluation and a critical appraisal of explanations put forward in different social arenas can take place on the basis of different values. Explanatory Pluralism provides solutions to all important descriptive and normative problems of the philosophical theory of explanation as illustrated in sophisticated case studies from economics and medicine, but also from mythology and religion.

About this title

About the Author

C. Mantzavinos is Professor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Athens. He has previously taught at Witten/Herdecke University, the University of Freiburg, the University of Bayreuth and Stanford University, and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris. He is the author of Wettbewerbstheorie (1994), Individuals, Institutions, and Markets (Cambridge, 2001) and Naturalistic Hermeneutics (Cambridge, 2005), and the editor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2009).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 110712851X
• ISBN 13: 9781107128514
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 234