An interesting finding is that although many children provided both teleological explanations and explanations for usefulness for the shape of particular items, there was not always a correlation between these two types of explanations (Table 2).
Interestingly enough, there was a correlation between teleological explanations and explanations for usefulness for the shape of the nutcracker (with which most children were unfamiliar), but not for the shape of the scissors (with which most children were familiar).
Definitions in a broad sense start with explanations, and explanations are divided into contextual definitions of simple concepts (or of concepts that we are not able to define) and definitions in the strict sense, namely the decompositions of a concept into its parts.
Using this insight, we then explore two recent contributions: Fourier slice photography in computer graphics and wavefront coding in optics, and we examine the similarity between explanations of them using Wigner distributions and explanations of them using light fields.
The debates over 'adaptationism' in the 1980's made philosophers familiar with the complex interactions between explanations of traits in evolutionary biology and explanations of the same traits in developmental biology.
We examined the frequency with which biology majors spontaneously used notions of evolutionary "pressures" in their explanations, students' definitions and explanations of what they meant when they used pressures, and the structure of explanatory models that incorporated evolutionary pressures and forces.
For Aristotle, 'historia', which corresponds roughly to our systematics the scientific organization of information about animals—serves the goal of causal explanation; and explanation by reference to goals and functions is the primary form of causal explanation.
Knowing why asking why is our conduit to every kind of explanation, and explanation, increasingly, is what powers medical advances.
This at least raises the question of whether our explanations – including explanations of evil – show that freedom is just a myth, or try to avoid and undermine freedom, or simply express our freedom to seek one kind of explanation rather than another.
Causal Explanations; Models; Explanations of Meaning; Narratives.
