Explanatory Pluralism (Hardcover)

C. Mantzavinos

ISBN 10: 110712851X / ISBN 13: 9781107128514

Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016

About this Item

Hardcover. 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. The main activity that scientists engage in is the provision of explanations. This book defends the position of explanatory pluralism, namely the position that there are many points of view from which to describe and evaluate scientific explanations, and offers lively discussions of case studies from a variety of disciplines. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781107128514

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Explanatory Pluralism (Hardcover)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 110712851X
• ISBN 13: 9781107128514
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

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 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).