Realizability and the varieties of explanation

Using an account given in Huneman (2017), I argue that within those explanations the fact that some mathematical properties are instantiated is explanatory, and that this defines a specific explanatory type called “structural explanation”, whose subtypes could be: optimality explanations (usually found in economics), topological explanations, etc. This paper thereby argues that all subtypes of structural explanation define several kinds of realizability, which are not equivalent to the usual notion of realization tied to mechanistic explanations, onto which many of the philosophical investigations are focused. Then it draws some consequences concerning the notion of multiple realizability.