Abstract
There are several important criticisms against the unificationist model of scientific explanation: (1) Unification is a broad and heterogeneous notion and it is hard to see how a model of explanation based exclusively on unification can make a distinction between genuine explanatory unification from cases of ordering or classification. (2) Unification alone cannot solve the asymmetry and irrelevance problems. (3) Unification and explanation pull in different directions and should be decoupled, because for good scientific explanation extra ad explanandum information is often required. I am presenting a possible solution to those problems, by focusing on an often overlooked but important element of how theoretic unification is achieved—the conceptual frameworks of theories. The core conceptual assumptions behind theories are decisive for discriminating between explanatory and non-explanatory unification. The conceptual framework is also flexible enough to balance the tension between informativeness and maximum systematization in constructing explanatory inferences. A short case study of orthogenetic and Darwinian explanations in paleontology is presented as an illustration of how my addition to the unificationist model is applicable to a historical debate between rival explanations.
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Notes
Adapted from Bouchard and Rosenberg (2004).
The scope of invariance and stability in this sense is defined not by realistically possible interventions or experiments which are limited in range, but by a form of counterfactual. This, however, is not so straightforward. To measure the scope of invariance and stability in this way requires some form of quantifying or counting the interventions. Here, however, we are interested in conceptually possible interventions, not on actual experimental ones. But this creates an infinity of similar interventions with every addition of intermediate steps between “firing a gun ? person’s death” because the possible worlds in which the interventions are carried out are defined within a logical space characterized by “an abundance” of possible worlds. To quote Lewis (1986, p. 86):
(1) absolutely every way that a world could possibly is a way that some world is and
(2) absolutely every way that a part of a world could possibly be is a way that some part of some world is.
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Petkov, S. Explanatory unification and conceptualization. Synthese 192, 3695–3717 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0716-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0716-2