Explanatory Pluralism - C. Mantzavinos

. .

Résumé :
This book proposes a new philosophical theory of scientific explanation by developing and defending the position of explanatory pluralism.

Biographie:
C. Mantzavinos is Professor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Athens. He has previously taught at Witten/Herdecke University, the University of Freiburg, the University of Bayreuth and Stanford University, and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris. He is the author of Wettbewerbstheorie (1994), Individuals, Institutions, and Markets (Cambridge, 2001) and Naturalistic Hermeneutics (Cambridge, 2005), and the editor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2009).

Sommaire:
1. Introduction; 2. The wrong question: what is an explanation?; 3. A brief outlook on the social sciences; 4. Towards explanatory pluralism; 5. The explanatory enterprise; 6. The rules of the explanatory game; 7. The plurality of explanatory games; 8. Explanatory activity as problem solving activity; 9. Explanatory rules as shared rules; 10. Normative appraisal: a procedural conception; 11. Explanatory methodology as technology; 12. Epilogue.