Last week, Lena Kästner visited the philosophy department at University of Stuttgart. Her visit was hosted by Prof. Dr. Ulrike Pompe-Alama. In the local colloquium, Lena presented some recent work on mechanistic explanations and scientific discovery to philosophers and experts in the history of science and technology. The core idea of Lena’s discovery account is to conceive of discovery as search for explanations. The search space is constrained by both ontic and epistemic norms and the explanations to be found can take different forms depending on the explanatory context at hand. These ideas are central to EIS: Explanations, we take it, are context-sensitive. How explanations are constructed, which factors drive the process, and which results count as suitable for explaining the behavior of an AI system will depend on the concrete scenario.
