Explanations

Your guide to becoming an explanation specialist. You've done the hard work. Your product or service works beautifully - but something is missing. People just don't see the big idea - and it's keeping you from being successful. Your idea has an explanation problem. The Art of Explanation is for business people, educators and influencers who want to improve their explanation skills and start solving explanation problems. Author Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft, a company known around the world for making complex ideas easy to understand through short animated videos. He is your guide to helping audiences fall in love with your ideas, products or services through better explanations in any medium. You will learn to: Plan: Learn explanation basics, what causes them to fail and how to diagnose explanation problems. Package: Using simple elements, create an explanation strategy that builds confidence and motivates your audience. Present: Produce remarkable explanations with visuals and media. The Art of Explanation is your invitation to become an explanation specialist and see why explanation is now a fundamental skill for professionals.

Nozick develops new views on philosophy’s central topics and weaves them into a unified perspective. He ranges widely over philosophy’s fundamental concerns: the identity of the self, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the question of why there is something rather than nothing, the foundations of ethics, the meaning of life.

Twenty philosophers offer new essays examining the form of reasoning known as inference to the best explanation - widely used in science and in our everyday lives, yet still controversial. Best Explanations represents the state of the art when it comes to understanding, criticizing, and defending this form of reasoning.

The first comprehensive exploration of the nature and value of understanding, addressing burgeoning debates in epistemology and philosophy of science.

Carl G. Hempel exerted greater influence upon philosophers of science than any other figure during the 20th century. In this far-reaching collection, distinguished philosophers contribute valuable studies that illuminate and clarify the central problems to which Hempel was devoted. The essays enhance our understanding of the development of logical empiricism as the major intellectual influence for scientifically-oriented philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists of the 20th century.

A new approach to the definition of scientific explanation. Unlike standard theories, it focuses initially on the explaining act itself, to which reference must be made in order to understand what an explanation is and how it can be evaluated in the sciences.

In broad, nonmathematical terms, the author explains how evolutionary ideas can be applied in the social sciences. The book was one of the early attempts to publicise the rise of sociobiology.

First Published in 1986. In the age of the computer, conjecture about things mechanical has naturally led to the question of whether machines can think. As the emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly, questions about machine intelligence have begun to have a certain urgency. The question we are concerned with in this book is: If we can find a set of processes that machines can slavishly follow, and if by so doing, these machines can come up with creative thoughts, what would that tell us about human beings? If the machine's procedure was adapted from a human procedure, that is, if all the machine was doing was what we know people are doing, would we abandon our inherent skepticism about the abilities of machines, or would we demystify our inherent admiration for things human? In a sense, these are the issues dealt with in this book. The author says in a sense because this book is no way a philosophical treatise. Rather it is an exercise in Artificial Intelligence and in Cognitive Science, it is an attempt to come to understand one of the most complex problems of mind by examining some of the mechanisms of mind: to define the apparatus that underlies our ability to think.

This open access book provides an exploration of the consequences of the ontological differences between natural and social objects (sometimes described as objects of nature and objects of thought) in the workings of causal and agency relationships. One of its important and possibly original conclusions is that causal and agency relationships do not encompass all of the dependent relationships encountered in social life. The idea that social reality is contingent has been known (and largely undisputed) at least since Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty”, but social science, and most notably economics has continued to operate on the basis of causal and agency theories borrowed or adapted from the natural sciences. This volume contains essays that retain and justify the partial or qualified use of this approach and essays that totally reject any use of causal and agency theory built on determined facts (closed systems).The rejection is based on the possibly original claim that, whereas causation in the objects of the natural sciences reside in their properties, human action is a matter of intentionality. It engages with critical realist theory and re-examines the role of free will in theories of human action in general and economic theory in particular.