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In philosophy, an explanation is a set of statements that renders understandable the existence or occurrence of an object, event, or state of affairs. Among its most common forms are: Causal explanation; Deductive-nomological explanation, involves subsuming the explanandum under a generalization from which it may be derived in a deductive ...
In some works of Aristotle, the four causes are listed as (1) the essential cause, (2) the logical ground, (3) the moving cause, and (4) the final cause. In this listing, a statement of essential cause is a demonstration that an indicated object conforms to a definition of the word that refers to it.
Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect.The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one.
Some philosophers (one being John Broome [5]) view normative reasons as the same as "explanations of ought facts".Just as explanatory reasons explain why some descriptive fact obtains (or came to obtain), normative reasons on this view explain why some normative facts obtain, i.e., they explain why some state of affairs ought to come to obtain (e.g., why someone should act or why some event ...
Statements that a species does something "in order to" achieve survival are teleological. The validity or invalidity of such statements depends on the species and the intention of the writer as to the meaning of the phrase "in order to." Sometimes it is possible or useful to rewrite such sentences so as to avoid teleology. [51]
Whereas locus of control cuts across both positive and negative outcomes, authors in the attributional style field have distinguished between a Pessimistic Explanatory Style, in which failures are attributed to internal, stable, and global factors and successes to external, unstable, and specific causes, and an Optimistic Explanatory Style, in ...
Environmentalist Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an impressive feat in and of itself.What's even more admirable was her work in science, a field in which women faced many obstacles, as well as the time she spent getting her Ph.D. in chemistry from MIT– well, almost.
Causal analysis is the field of experimental design and statistics pertaining to establishing cause and effect. [1] Typically it involves establishing four elements: correlation, sequence in time (that is, causes must occur before their proposed effect), a plausible physical or information-theoretical mechanism for an observed effect to follow from a possible cause, and eliminating the ...