Authors:	Craver, Carl F.
Title:	Levels
Online publication date:	10-Nov-2016
Year of first publication:	2015
Language:	english
Abstract:	The levels metaphor is commonly used to describe science, its theories, and the world. Yet the metaphor means different things in different contexts, inviting equivocation. These distinct applications of the metaphor can be distinguished by the relata they relate, the relation between levels that they assert, and the rule by which they locate items at a level. I discuss these many applications of the levels metaphor with an eye to developing a descriptively adequate account of one particular application: levels of mechanisms. I argue that this application of the metaphor is central to the explanatory practices of the special sciences and defensible as a metaphysical picture of how phenomena studied in the special sciences are constituted.
DDC:	100 Philosophie 100 Philosophy
Institution:	Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Department:	FB 05 Philosophie und Philologie
Place:	Mainz
ROR:	https://ror.org/023b0x485
DOI:	http://doi.org/10.25358/openscience-435
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hebis:77-publ-551443
Version:	Published version
Publication type:	Buchbeitrag
License:	In Copyright
Information on rights of use:	https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Citation:	Open MIND Metzinger, Thomas
Pages or article number:	Kap. 8(T)
Publisher:	MIND Group
Publisher place:	Frankfurt am Main
Issue date:	2015
Publisher URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.15502/9783958570498
Publisher DOI:	10.15502/9783958570498
Appears in collections:	JGU-Publikationen