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Explanation and Understanding book cover

1st Edition

Explanation and Understanding

By Arnon Levy Copyright 2025
222 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

222 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

222 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Science has multiple goals: to describe the world, as it is now; to predict the future and to make inferences about the past. Science also aims to understand the world – to explain why it is the way it is. But what does it take to explain a phenomenon? How does science generate understanding and what does that take? In this thorough and clearly written introduction to scientific explanation,... Read more

1. Introduction: what this book (and isn’t) about

2. Empicicist accounts of scientific explanation

3. The move to causal accounts

4. Explanation and difference-making

5. Production and mechanistic explanation

6. Models and explanation

7. Beyond causal explanation

8. What is understanding?

9. Connecting understanding and explanation

10. Coda: the place of explanation

Glossary

References

Index

Biography

Arnon Levy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He holds a PhD in philosophy and an MA in biology, both from Harvard University. His work covers explanation and understanding in science, the nature of modeling and scientific representation, and the role of science in society.

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