Marc Lange
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3866074 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Marc Lange |
| PRENOMES | Marc |
| SOBRENOME | Lange |
| ASSINATURA | LANGE M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0704-7376 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 188 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1988 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Defending “Distinctively Mathematical” Scientific Explanations
Jha et al. (2024) offer several objections to Lange’s account of “distinctively mathematical” scientific explanations (DMEs). This article argues that these objections fail. Jha et al.’s arguments fail to show that Lange is inconsistent in characterizing DMEs—that, by Lange’s lights, every causal explanation involving mathematical facts is a DME. Jha et al.’s arguments fail to suggest that on Lange’s account, DME’s are too common or explanatorily…
Can Pragmatic Humeanism Account for the Counterfactual Invariance of Natural Laws
Explanatory Proofs and Grounding in Mathematics
Do explanatory proofs of theorems in mathematics derive their explanatory power by virtue of providing information about the grounds of the theorems they explain? I have argued that they do not (Lange 2019), and I have offered my own account of what makes certain mathematical proofs but not others able to explain why some theorem holds (Lange 2017). Recently, Maarefi (2025) has critiqued both these arguments and that account in support of a groun…
Laws of nature, metaphysics, and science education
Reichenbach’s Lecture “The Problem of Laws of Nature”
The Necessity of Accidents in advance
We argue that if there are laws of nature, then there must also be accidents. If the “laws” in a world suffice to determine the world’s entire history, then these “laws” cannot play various central roles characteristic of laws, and thus (we conclude) they are not laws at all. Many proposed accounts of lawhood (primitivist accounts, universals accounts, the Best System Account, the Package Deal Account, essentialist accounts) inappropriately permi…
How Simplicity Can be a Virtue in Philosophical Theory-Choice
A false dichotomy in denying explanatoriness any role in confirmation
Roche and Sober (2013; 2014; 2017; 2019) have offered an important new argument that explanatoriness lacks confirmatory significance. My aim in this paper is not only to contend that their argument fails to show that in confirmation ‘there is nothing special about explanatoriness’ (Roche & Sober, 2017: 589), but also to reveal what is special confirmationwise about explanatoriness. I will argue that much of the heavy work in Roche and Sober's arg…
Why Is Proof the Only Way to Acquire Mathematical Knowledge
This paper proposes an account of why proof is the only way to acquire knowledge of some mathematical proposition’s truth. Admittedly, non-deductive arguments for mathematical propositions can be strong and play important roles in mathematics. But this paper proposes a necessary condition for knowledge that can be satisfied by putative proofs (and proof sketches), as well as by non-deductive arguments in science, but not by non-deductive argument…
More on Why Contingent Facts Cannot Necessities Make
A new circularity in explanations by Humean laws of nature
Putting explanation back into “inference to the best explanation”
Many philosophers argue that explanatoriness plays no special role in confirmation – that “inference to the best explanation” (IBE) incorrectly demands giving hypotheses extra credit for their potential explanatory qualities beyond the credit they already deserve for their predictive successes. This paper argues against one common strategy for responding to this thought – that is, for trying to fit IBE within a Bayesian framework. That strategy a…
Inference to the best explanation as supporting the expansion of mathematicians’ ontological commitments
In defense of really statistical explanations
Against Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Quality
Several philosophers propose probabilistic measures of how well a potential scientific explanation would explain the given evidence. These measures could elaborate “best” in “inference to the best explanation”. This paper argues that none of these measures (and no other measure built exclusively from such probabilities) succeeds. The paper considers the various rival explanations that scientists proposed for the parallelogram of forces. Scientist…
Why Trust Science?
Running it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes
Does smoke cause fire or does fire cause smoke? James Woodward’s “Flagpoles anyone? Causal and explanatory asymmetries” argues that various statistical independence relations not only help us to uncover the directions of causal and explanatory relations in our world, but also are the worldly basis of causal and explanatory directions. We raise questions about Woodward’s envisioned epistemology, but our primary focus is on his metaphysics. We argu…
Asymmetry as a challenge to counterfactual accounts of non-causal explanation
What could mathematics be for it to function in distinctively mathematical scientific explanations
Why Trust Science
Replies to Heron and Knox, Morrison, and Strevens
Precis of Because Without Cause
What Would Normative Necessity Be?
A reply to Craver and Povich on the directionality of distinctively mathematical explanations
Transitivity, self-explanation, and the explanatory circularity argument against Humean accounts of natural law
What Makes a Scientific Explanation Distinctively Mathematical
Certain scientific explanations of physical facts have recently been characterized as distinctively mathematical–that is, as mathematical in a different way from ordinary explanations that employ mathematics. This article identifies what it is that makes some scientific explanations distinctively mathematical and how such explanations work. These explanations are non-causal, but this does not mean that they fail to cite the explanandum’s causes, …
Aspects of Mathematical Explanation
Unlike explanation in science, explanation in mathematics has received relatively scant attention from philosophers. Whereas there are canonical examples of scientific explanations (as well as canonical examples of nonexplanations, such as “the flagpole,” “the eclipse,” and “the barometer”), there are few (if any) examples that have become widely accepted as exhibiting the distinction between mathematical proofs that explain why some mathematical…
The Apparent Superiority of Prediction to Accommodation as a Side Effect
Maher ([1990], [1993]) has offered a lovely example to motivate the intuition that a successful prediction has a kind of confirmatory significance that an accommodation lacks. This paper scrutinizes Maher's example. It argues that once the example is tweaked, the intuitive difference there between prediction and accommodation disappears. This suggests that the apparent superiority of prediction to accommodation is actually a side effect of an imp…
Is Jeffrey Conditionalization Defective By Virtue of Being Non-Commutative? Remarks on the Sameness of Sensory Experiences
Transitivity, self-explanation, and the explanatory circularity argument against Humean accounts of natural law
Really Statistical Explanations and Genetic Drift
Really statistical (RS) explanation is a hitherto neglected form of noncausal scientific explanation. Explanations in population biology that appeal to drift are RS explanations. An RS explanation supplies a kind of understanding that a causal explanation of the same result cannot supply. Roughly speaking, an RS explanation shows the result to be mere statistical fallout
Conservation Laws in Scientific Explanations
A conservation law in physics can be either a constraint on the kinds of interaction there could be or a coincidence of the kinds of interactions there actually are. This is an important, unjustly neglected distinction. Only if a conservation law constrains the possible kinds of interaction can a derivation from it constitute a scientific explanation despite failing to describe the causal/mechanical details behind the result derived. This concept…
Laws and Their Stability
How Can Instantaneous Velocity Fulfill Its Causal Role
Research Article| October 01 2005 How Can Instantaneous Velocity Fulfill Its Causal Role? Marc Lange Marc Lange Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2005) 114 (4): 433–468. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-114-4-433 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marc Lange; How Can Instantaneous Velocity Fulfill Its Causal Role?. The Philosophical R…
Could the Laws of Nature Change
After reviewing several failed arguments that laws cannot change, I use the laws’ special relation to counterfactuals to show how temporary laws would have to differ from eternal but time-dependent laws. Then I argue that temporary laws are impossible and that neither Lewis's nor Armstrong's analyses of law nicely accounts for the laws’ immutability
What could mathematics be for it to function in distinctively mathematical scientific explanations
Do Chances Receive Equal Treatment Under The Laws? Or
I offer an argument regarding chances that appears to yield a dilemma: either the chances at time t must be determined by the natural laws and the history through t of instantiations of categorical properties, or the function ch(•) assigning chances need not satisfy the axioms of probability. The dilemma's first horn might seem like a remnant of determinism. On the other hand, this horn might be inspired by our best scientific theories. In additi…
Life, “Artificial Life,” and Scientific Explanation
Recently, biologists and computer scientists who advocate the “strong thesis of artificial life” have argued that the distinction between life and nonlife is important and that certain computer software entities could be alive in the same sense as biological entities. These arguments have been challenged by Sober (1991). I address some of the questions about the rational reconstruction of biology that are suggested by these arguments: What is the…
Against Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Quality
Several philosophers propose probabilistic measures of how well a potential scientific explanation would explain the given evidence. These measures could elaborate “best” in “inference to the best explanation”. This paper argues that none of these measures (and no other measure built exclusively from such probabilities) succeeds. The paper considers the various rival explanations that scientists proposed for the parallelogram of forces. Scientist…
Asymmetry as a challenge to counterfactual accounts of non-causal explanation
Okasha on Inductive Scepticism
Journal Article Okasha on Inductive Scepticism Get access Marc Lange Marc Lange University of Washington, [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 52, Issue 207, April 2002, Pages 226–232, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00264 Published: 07 January 2003
Laws, Counterfactuals, Stability, and Degrees of Lawhood
I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not “broader”—at least in the most straightforward sense.) The sta…
Why Are the Laws of Nature So Important to Science
Why should science be so interested in discovering whether p is a law over and above whether p is true? The answer may involve the laws' relation to counterfactuals: p is a law iff p would still have obtained under any counterfactual supposition that is consistent with the laws. But unless we already understand why science is especially concerned with the laws, we cannot explain why science is especially interested in what would have happened und…
Spearman's Principle
Glymour, Scheines, Spirtes, and Kelly argue for ‘Spearman's Principle’: one should (ceteris paribus) favour the theory whose ‘free parameters’ need assume no particular values for the theory to save the ‘constraints’ holding of the phenomena. I argue that the rationale they give for Spearman's Principle fails, but that (contra Cartwright) Spearman's Principle cannot be made to favour either of two theories depending on how they are expressed. I e…
Precis of Because Without Cause
Hui Shih's Logical Theory of Descriptions
Spearman's Principle
Glymour, Scheines, Spirtes, and Kelly argue for ‘Spearman's Principle’: one should (ceteris paribus) favour the theory whose ‘free parameters’ need assume no particular values for the theory to save the ‘constraints’ holding of the phenomena. I argue that the rationale they give for Spearman's Principle fails, but that (contra Cartwright) Spearman's Principle cannot be made to favour either of two theories depending on how they are expressed. I e…
Life, “Artificial Life,” and Scientific Explanation
Recently, biologists and computer scientists who advocate the “strong thesis of artificial life” have argued that the distinction between life and nonlife is important and that certain computer software entities could be alive in the same sense as biological entities. These arguments have been challenged by Sober (1991). I address some of the questions about the rational reconstruction of biology that are suggested by these arguments: What is the…
Laws, Counterfactuals, Stability, and Degrees of Lawhood
I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not “broader”—at least in the most straightforward sense.) The sta…
Why Are the Laws of Nature So Important to Science
Why should science be so interested in discovering whether p is a law over and above whether p is true? The answer may involve the laws' relation to counterfactuals: p is a law iff p would still have obtained under any counterfactual supposition that is consistent with the laws. But unless we already understand why science is especially concerned with the laws, we cannot explain why science is especially interested in what would have happened und…
Natural Laws In Scientific Practice
Laws of nature have long been thought to have special significance for aspects of scientific reasoning such as counterfactual conditionals, inductive projections, and scientific explanations. But the laws' distinctive roles in scientific reasoning have proved notoriously difficult to identify precisely, leading some philosophers even to suggest that there are no such roles. The aim of this book is to determine these roles and see what a law of na…
Is Jeffrey Conditionalization Defective By Virtue of Being Non-Commutative? Remarks on the Sameness of Sensory Experiences
The Apparent Superiority of Prediction to Accommodation as a Side Effect
Maher ([1990], [1993]) has offered a lovely example to motivate the intuition that a successful prediction has a kind of confirmatory significance that an accommodation lacks. This paper scrutinizes Maher's example. It argues that once the example is tweaked, the intuitive difference there between prediction and accommodation disappears. This suggests that the apparent superiority of prediction to accommodation is actually a side effect of an imp…
Okasha on Inductive Scepticism
Journal Article Okasha on Inductive Scepticism Get access Marc Lange Marc Lange University of Washington, [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 52, Issue 207, April 2002, Pages 226–232, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00264 Published: 07 January 2003
Bayesianism and Unification
Myrvold (2003) has proposed an attractive Bayesian account of why theories that unify phenomena tend to derive greater epistemic support from those phenomena than do theories that fail to unify them. It is argued, however, that “unification” in Myrvold's sense is both too easy and too difficult for theories to achieve. Myrvold's account fails to capture what it is that makes unification sometimes count in a theory's favor
Laws and Their Stability
How Can Instantaneous Velocity Fulfill Its Causal Role
Research Article| October 01 2005 How Can Instantaneous Velocity Fulfill Its Causal Role? Marc Lange Marc Lange Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2005) 114 (4): 433–468. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-114-4-433 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marc Lange; How Can Instantaneous Velocity Fulfill Its Causal Role?. The Philosophical R…
Farewell to laws of nature
Do Chances Receive Equal Treatment Under The Laws? Or
I offer an argument regarding chances that appears to yield a dilemma: either the chances at time t must be determined by the natural laws and the history through t of instantiations of categorical properties, or the function ch(•) assigning chances need not satisfy the axioms of probability. The dilemma's first horn might seem like a remnant of determinism. On the other hand, this horn might be inspired by our best scientific theories. In additi…
Laws and meta-laws of nature
Could the Laws of Nature Change
After reviewing several failed arguments that laws cannot change, I use the laws’ special relation to counterfactuals to show how temporary laws would have to differ from eternal but time-dependent laws. Then I argue that temporary laws are impossible and that neither Lewis's nor Armstrong's analyses of law nicely accounts for the laws’ immutability
Laws and Lawmakers Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature
What distinguishes laws of nature from ordinary facts? What are the 'lawmakers': the facts in virtue of which the laws are laws? How can laws be necessary, yet contingent? Lange provocatively argues that laws are distinguished by their necessity, while also providing a non-technical and accessible survey of the field.
Must the Fundamental Laws of Physics be Complete
Nature's Metaphysics
Book Review| January 01 2010 Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and Properties Alexander Bird, Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and Properties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 256 pp. Marc Lange Marc Lange Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2010) 119 (1): 97–99. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2009-027 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marc…
Conservation Laws in Scientific Explanations
A conservation law in physics can be either a constraint on the kinds of interaction there could be or a coincidence of the kinds of interactions there actually are. This is an important, unjustly neglected distinction. Only if a conservation law constrains the possible kinds of interaction can a derivation from it constitute a scientific explanation despite failing to describe the causal/mechanical details behind the result derived. This concept…
Abstraction and Depth in Scientific Explanation
Really Statistical Explanations and Genetic Drift
Really statistical (RS) explanation is a hitherto neglected form of noncausal scientific explanation. Explanations in population biology that appeal to drift are RS explanations. An RS explanation supplies a kind of understanding that a causal explanation of the same result cannot supply. Roughly speaking, an RS explanation shows the result to be mere statistical fallout
What Makes a Scientific Explanation Distinctively Mathematical
Certain scientific explanations of physical facts have recently been characterized as distinctively mathematical–that is, as mathematical in a different way from ordinary explanations that employ mathematics. This article identifies what it is that makes some scientific explanations distinctively mathematical and how such explanations work. These explanations are non-causal, but this does not mean that they fail to cite the explanandum’s causes, …
Aspects of Mathematical Explanation
Unlike explanation in science, explanation in mathematics has received relatively scant attention from philosophers. Whereas there are canonical examples of scientific explanations (as well as canonical examples of nonexplanations, such as “the flagpole,” “the eclipse,” and “the barometer”), there are few (if any) examples that have become widely accepted as exhibiting the distinction between mathematical proofs that explain why some mathematical…
On “Minimal Model Explanations”
Batterman and Rice offer an account of “minimal model explanations” and argue against “common features accounts” of those explanations. This paper offers some objections to their proposals and arguments. It argues that their proposal cannot account for the apparent explanatory asymmetry of minimal model explanations. It argues that their account threatens ultimately to collapse into a “common features account.” Finally, it argues against their mo…
Philosophy (42 obras) · Epistemology (38 obras) · Philosophy and History of Science (38 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (20 obras) · Mathematics (19 obras) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (18 obras) · Political science (16 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Metaphysics (11 obras)