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DOI 10.1007/s10699-004-5245-2Foundations of Science (2005) 10: 349–351 © Springer 2005
ERIK WEBER & PETRI YLIKOSKI
PREFACE
The articles in this special issue deal with one or more of thefollowing topics: (scientific) laws, dispositions, (scientific) expla-nations.
In The Dispositionalist Conception of Laws, Alexander Birdsketches a dispositionalist conception of laws and shows how thedispositionalist should respond to certain objections. He arguesthat the view that properties are essentially dispositional is ableto provide an account of laws that avoids the problems that facethe two views of laws (the regularity and the contingent nomicnecessitation views) that regard properties as categorical and lawsas contingent.
While Bird’s paper is about laws and dispositions, Tropes asMechanisms by Johannes Persson discusses laws as opposed tomechanisms. Persson attempts to further our understanding ofmechanisms conceived of as ontologically separable from laws.What opportunities are there for a mechanistic perspective to beindependent of, or even more fundamental than, a law perspec-tive? To answer this question, Persson adopts a trope ontology,which is independent of the notion of law, and can be adapted toaccount for such characteristics of mechanisms. He argues thatlaw accounts are special cases of mechanistic accounts, and thatthey work only in those worlds where the mechanisms are of theright kind.
The three other papers focus on scientific explanation. In eachof them, the role of laws in explanations is among the themes thatare discussed.
In The Third Dogma Revisited, Petri Ylikoski argues that thereare some serious problems with the Wesley Salmon’s argumentsagainst the so-called third dogma of empiricism. In the first partof the paper, he shows that Salmon’s formulation of the dogma isambiguous (it can be read in at least four different ways) and that
350 ERIK WEBER AND PETRI YLIKOSKI
Salmon’s arguments against the dogma are only able to refute thestrongest version of it. The second part of the paper considers theidea that covering laws have a constitutive role in singular causalexplanation and argues that this idea is not plausible.
In A Unificationist Theory of Explanation, Rebeca Schwederdefends a unificationist theory of explanation. She explores thenotion of understanding entrenched by the unificationist. Thenshe presents an overview of various kinds of causal statements andexplanations. It is claimed that only genuine causal law statementshave explanatory power. Finally, she tries to fit causal explana-tions into the unificationist theory of explanation.
In Forms of Causal Explanation, Erik Weber, Jeroen VanBouwel and Robrecht Vanderbeeken argue for pluralism withinthe area of causal explanations: they claim that the structure ofa causal explanation depends on the causal structure of the rele-vant fragment of the world and on the interests of the explainer.They argue that this pluralism must supplement the two types ofpluralism that are widely accepted in the literature on scientificexplanation, viz. the distinction between explanations of singularfacts and explanations of laws (there is a consensus that they havea different structure) and the distinction between causal explana-tions and unification explanations (most people agree that bothare useful and that their structure is different).
The idea for compiling this volume grew at the workshopCausal Powers, Laws and Explanation (University of Oslo, 13–15October 2000) organised by the Nordic Network on the Theoryof Explanation. At this workshop, the contributors of this vol-ume presented a version of their article. Other papers presented(not included in this volume) at the workshop were: Mental Cau-sation (Carsten Hansen, Oslo), Causality, Reality and Inferenceto the Best Explanation (Mikael Karlsson, Iceland) and Laws,Singular Causation and Mental Causation (Jan Faye, Copenha-gen).
Erik WeberCentre for Logic and Philosophy of ScienceUniversiteit GentBlandijnberg 2, B-9000 Gent, BelgiumE-mail: [email protected]
PREFACE 351
Petri YlikoskiHelsinki Collegium for Advanced StudiesP.O. Box 4, 00014 University of Helsinki, FinlandE-mail: [email protected]
