Abstract
It is an open question whether we ever successfully explain earlier states by appealing to later ones, and, further, whether this is even possible. Typically, these two questions are answered in the same way: if we give and accept ‘backwards explanations,’ they must be possible; if they are impossible, we are right to reject them. I argue that backwards explanations are brittle—they fail if the future event does not occur—and this is part of the reason they are not accepted about the actual world. This does not mean, however, that they must be rejected entirely. I argue that backwards explanations are possible for certain systems. This shields unificationism about scientific explanation from some recent criticisms.
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Notes
Further, practicing volcanologists seem only to make claims about the likelihood of an eruption (of a particular sort) over some time-frame (Fountain 2015). Their predictions seem to be sensitive to uncertainty about the future. It would then be appropriate to treat their explanations as being similarly sensitive, that is, as being given in terms of the information they have and not the predictions they are making.
I follow the Woodward development of this objection, and have modified the exposition to make the case clearer, more consistent and simpler to explain. There are two ways of interpreting the objection, and I address both of them in turn.
Modulo that I am not sure that ‘retrodiction’ has a ‘normal sense.’
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for alerting me to this reading of Woodward’s concerns.
One might worry that the ‘backwards’ in ‘backwards explanation’ makes no sense for a system that is time-direction indifferent, thinking that all explanations will be in some sense a-temporal and therefore not ‘backwards.’ This is not so, though: there can be time-direction indifferent systems that do indeed have a set direction of time, it will just be the case that the direction of time will not figure in explanations for that system. It is true that their ‘backwardness’ does not make these explanations as interesting in a time-direction indifferent system as they would be in a temporally asymmetric system, but they would still comprise a distinguishable class of successful explanation.
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Fry, R.J. Backwards explanation and unification. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 6, 55–70 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-015-0121-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-015-0121-1