Theoretical explanation and ontological commitments: a structuralist model

Abstract

In this essay, I set out to sketch a model of «theoretical explanation with ontological commitments». I do not claim that this model is applicable to the use of ‘explanation’ in dailylife, nor that it is applicable to all scientific context. I only claim that it has genuine meaningin large portions of the natural sciences, particularly in physics, and more generally inthose disciplines that have been more or less systematically mathematised. My overall thesis,which I shall try to articulate here, is simply the following: at least in many contextsin the theoretical sciences, explanation takes on the guise of inserting a structure of datainto a theoretical model, some of whose components, precisely the theoretical ones, mighthave a causal interpretation.