Mathematics and Explanatory Generality: Nothing but Cognitive Salience

Autor:	Juha Saatsi, Robert Knowles
Rok vydání:	2019
Předmět:	Counterfactual thinking Generality Salience (language) Logic 05 social sciences GRASP Cognition 06 humanities and the arts 050905 science studies 0603 philosophy ethics and religion Epistemology Philosophy Nominalism Procurement Nothing 060302 philosophy 0509 other social sciences
Zdroj:	Erkenntnis. 86:1119-1137
ISSN:	1572-8420 0165-0106
Popis:	We demonstrate how real progress can be made in the debate surrounding the enhanced indispensability argument. Drawing on a counterfactual theory of explanation, well-motivated independently of the debate, we provide a novel analysis of ‘explanatory generality’ and how mathematics is involved in its procurement. On our analysis, mathematics’ sole explanatory contribution to the procurement of explanatory generality is to make counterfactual information about physical dependencies easier to grasp and reason with for creatures like us. This gives precise content to key intuitions traded in the debate, regarding mathematics’ procurement of explanatory generality, and adjudicates unambiguously in favour of the nominalist, at least as far as explanatory generality is concerned.
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_dedup___::9f3dd28d81921396b46a3b0b2f4cd16c https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00146-x Zobrazit plný text záznamu Full text from SpringerLink