Abstract

In his recent book Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World Wesley Salmon provides a detailed explication of objective homogeneity, a concept which is central to his Statistical-Relevance (S-R) model of explanation. One of the purposes of Salmon’s explication is to refute Hempel’s thesis of the epistemic relativity of statistical explanation. According to this thesis “the concept of statistical explanation for particular events is essentially relative to a given knowledge situation” (Hempel 1965, pp. 402-403, quoted in Salmon 1984, p. 48). Salmon introduces (1984, p. 55) the concept that forms the basis for his S-R model as follows: “A reference class A is homogeneous with respect to an attribute B provided there is no set of properties Ci (1 ≤i ≤ k; k ≥ 2) in terms of which A can be relevantly partitioned.