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Are Identities Unexplainable? Towards a Non‐causal Contrastive Explanation of Identities
Author(s) -
Azzano Lorenzo,
Carrara Massimiliano
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
theoria
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.34
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1755-2567
pISSN - 0040-5825
DOI - 10.1111/theo.12281
Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , sketch , identity (music) , epistemology , subject (documents) , logical consequence , simple (philosophy) , value (mathematics) , linguistics , psychology , computer science , philosophy , algorithm , aesthetics , biochemistry , chemistry , machine learning , library science
Can an identity be the proper subject of an explanation? A popular stance, albeit not one often argued for, gives a negative answer to this question. Building from a contentious passage from Jaegwon Kim in this direction, we reconstruct an argument to the conclusion that identities, to the extent in which they are necessary, cannot be explained. The notion of contrastive explanation, characterized as difference‐seeking, will be crucial for this argument; however, we will eventually find the argument to be unsatisfactory. On the contrary, the discussion provides enough resources to sketch a very simple framework for a non‐causal contrastive explanation of identities. Many instances will be provided, with different varieties of explanans , ultimately suggesting that certain entailment or biconditional principles involving identities (first and foremost, so‐called two‐level identity criteria) may indeed be taken to have an inherent explanatory value.