Meaning and Explanation.

[摘要] My dissertation investigates the semantic contribution of the individual words ;;why’ and ;;because;;, attempting to get clear on whether and how some of our central explanatory terminology gets disambiguated, and thereby to make some progress on a theory of ;;why’-questions that can tell us something substantive about explanation. I argue that ;;why’ and ;;because’ have literal causal senses, as well as distinct senses that we use to communicate metaphysical explanations. I show that apparent further semantic variations in the meaning of ;;because’ in its so-called epistemic and metalinguistic uses are illusory, and give a full explanation of those variations in terms of syntactic ambiguities. Finally, I argue that a causal metaphor unifies the senses of ;;why;; and ;;because;; at issue in metaphysical explanations with their literal causal senses. What this semantic investigation turns out to offer us, I argue, is a new understanding of the centrality of causal explanation to explanation in general.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Why

[关键词] Explanation;Why;Because;Causal Explanation;Metaphysical Explanation;Erotetic;Linguistics;Philosophy;Humanities;Philosophy