2023 ESSLI COURSE Proofs and explanations.
Amongst the several types of existing explanations, in the last decade philosophers have become receptive to the so called non causal or conceptual explanations. Conceptual explanations do not derive their explanatory power from a network of causal relations, but rather from a network of conceptual relations. Thus, conceptual explanations are prime facie a natural object for logical analysis. A rising amount of work has been dedicated to the application of proof-theoretical methods to formalise the notion of conceptual explanation: this work not only combines well-known proof-theoretic techniques, such as cut-elimination or normalization, with a deep philosophical analysis, but also it has introduced in logic the notion of explanation, a notion which has been so far largely neglected. The goal of this course is to make the student acquainted with the notion of conceptual explanation together with the proof-theoretic method used for its formalization.
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