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Realism and the limits of explanatory reasoning
In The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism. London: Routledge. pp. 200-211 (2018)
Abstract
This chapter examines issues surrounding inference to the best explanation, its justification, and its role in different arguments for scientific realism, as well as more general issues concerning explanations’ ontological commitments. Defending the reliability of inference to the best explanation has been a central plank in various realist arguments, and realists have drawn various ontological conclusions from the premise that a given scientific explanation best explains some phenomenon. This chapter stresses the importance of thinking carefully about the nature of explanation in connection with evaluating realists’ appeals to explanatory reasoning and inference to the best explanation.Author's Profile
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Citations of this work
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We Have Never Been “New Experimentalists”: On the Rise and Fall of the Turn to Experimentation in the 1980s.Jan Potters & Massimiliano Simons - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1):91-119.
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References found in this work
Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.Wesley C. Salmon - 1984 - Princeton University Press.
Explaining the brain: mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience.Carl F. Craver - 2007 - New York : Oxford University Press,: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation.Michael Strevens - 2008 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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