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    Deductive-nomological metaphysical explanation cannot acc... — Carmelics
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    Home/Modality & Possibility
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    Deductive-nomological metaphysical explanation cannot account for rare or one-off phenomena grounded in mechanisms.

    Causation
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Deductive-nomological explanation requires covering laws that subsume phenomena under regularities.
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    • 2.Rare or one-off phenomena grounded in mechanisms may not be subsumable under such regularities.
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    • 3.Even when a mechanism grounds or causes a phenomenon, a similar mechanism need not give rise to a similar phenomenon in one-off cases.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Mechanistic explanations can themselves be reconstructed as deductive arguments from laws governing component interactions, as Hempel and Oppenheim's 1948 framework allows multi-level subsumption.
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    • 2.A one-off phenomenon is still nomically constrained: the mechanism's components obey laws whose singular instantiation is deductively sufficient for the explanandum.
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    • 3.Scriven's objection that singular causation escapes DN explanation conflates epistemic inaccessibility of laws with their metaphysical absence from the explanatory structure.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Railton's deductive-nomological-probabilistic model extends DN explanation to cover mechanisms by deriving phenomenal descriptions from idealized models with probabilistic covering laws.
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    • 2.The rarity of a phenomenon is a statistical feature of its token frequency, not evidence that no law-governed process generated it, preserving DN's explanatory scope even for unique events.
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    Modality & PossibilityCausation

    Related

    A one-off phenomenon is still nomically constrained: the mechanism's components ...Deductive-nomological explanation requires covering laws that subsume phenomena ...Even when a mechanism grounds or causes a phenomenon, a similar mechanism need n...Mechanistic explanations can themselves be reconstructed as deductive arguments ...
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    Railton's deductive-nomological-probabilistic model extends DN explanation to co...Rare or one-off phenomena grounded in mechanisms may not be subsumable under suc...Scriven's objection that singular causation escapes DN explanation conflates epi...The rarity of a phenomenon is a statistical feature of its token frequency, not ...

    Similar

    Some metaphysical explanations are one-off phenomena, where a similar ...86%Deductive-nomological explanation requires that similar mechanisms giv...86%Deductive-nomological models cannot accommodate one-off explanations.85%Deductive-nomological explanation requires covering laws that subsume ...80%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: metaphysical-explanation
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    Finally, if metaphysical explanation is deductive-nomological (or “covering law”), it seems that there is no room for explanations of rare or one-off phenomena in terms of the mechanisms that ground (or cause) them, even in cases where, had a similar mechanism occurred, it need not have given rise to a similar phenomenon (e.g., Taylor 2016). According to Trogdon (2018; see also Anscombe 1971), it seems likely that some explanations are one-off in this sense, from which it would seem to follow th
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit