Scientific Explanation

Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

Scientific Explanation

First published Fri May 9, 2003; substantive revision Fri Jan 16, 2009

Issues concerning scientific explanation have been a focus of philosophical attention from Pre-Socratic times through the modern period. However, recent discussion really begins with thedevelopment of the Deductive-Nomological (

DN

) model. This model has had many advocates(including Popper 1935, 1959, Braithwaite 1953, Gardiner, 1959, Nagel 1961) butunquestionably the most detailed and influential statement is due to Carl Hempel (Hempel 1942,1965, and Hempel & Oppenheim 1948). These papers and the reaction to them have structuredsubsequent discussion concerning scientific explanation to an extraordinary degree. After somegeneral remarks by way of background and orientation (Section 1), this entry describes the

DN

model and its extensions, and then turns to some well-known objections (Section 2). It nextdescribes a variety of subsequent attempts to develop alternative models of explanation,including Wesley Salmon's

Statistical Relevance

(Section 3) and

Causal Mechanical

(Section 4)models and the

Unificationist

models due to Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher (Section 5).Section 6 provides a summary and discusses directions for future work.

•

1. Background and Introduction

•

○

2.1 The Basic Idea

○

2.2 The Role of Laws in the

○

2.3 Inductive Statistical Explanation

○

2.4 Motivation for the

Model: Nomic Expectability and a Regularity Accountof Causation

○

2.5 Counterexamples to Sufficiency

○

2.6 Counterexamples to Necessity and the Hidden Structure Strategy

•

3. The SR Model

○

3.1 The Basic Idea

○

3.2 The SR Model and Low Probability Events

○

3.3 What Do Statistical Theories Explain?

○

3.4 Causation and Statistical Relevance Relationships

•

4. The Causal Mechanical Model

○

4.1 The Basic Idea

○

Model and Explanatory Relevance

○

Model and Complex Systems

○

4.4 More Recent Developments

•

5. A Unificationist Account of Explanation

○

5.1 The Basic Idea

○

5.2 Illustrations of the Unificationist Model

○

5.3 The Illustrations Criticized

○

5.4 The Heterogeneity of Unification

○

5.5 The Winner-Take-All Conception of Explanatory Unification

○

5.6 The Epistemology of Unification

•

•

•

Other Internet Resources

•

Related Entries

1. Background and Introduction.

As will become apparent, “scientific explanation” is a topic that raises a number of interrelatedissues. Some background orientation will be useful before turning to the details of competingmodels. A presupposition of most recent discussion has been that science sometimes providesexplanations (rather than something that falls short of explanation—e.g., “mere description”) andthat the task of a “theory” or “model” of scientific explanation is to characterize the structure of such explanations. It is thus assumed that there is (at some suitably abstract and general level of description) a single kind or form of explanation that is “scientific”. In fact, the notion of “scientific explanation” suggests at least two contrasts—first, a contrast between those“explanations” that are characteristic of “science” and those explanations that are not, and,second, a contrast between “explanation” and something else. However, with respect to the firstcontrast, the tendency in much of the recent philosophical literature has been to assume that thereis a substantial continuity between the sorts of explanations found in science and at least someforms of explanation found in more ordinary non-scientific contexts, with the latter embodyingin a more or less inchoate way features that are present in a more detailed, precise, rigorous etc.form in the former. It is further assumed that it is the task of a theory of explanation to capturewhat is common to both scientific and at least some more ordinary forms of explanation. Theseassumptions help to explain (what may otherwise strike the reader as curious) why, as this entrywill illustrate, discussions of scientific explanation so often move back and forth betweenexamples drawn from bona-fide science (e.g., explanations of the trajectories of the planets thatappeal to Newtonian mechanics) and more homey examples involving the tipping over of inkwells.With respect to the second contrast, most models of explanation assume that it is possible for aset of claims to be true, accurate, supported by evidence, and so on and yet unexplanatory (atleast of anything that the typical explanation-seeker is likely to want explained). For example, allof the accounts of scientific explanation described below would agree that an account of theappearance of a particular species of bird of the sort found in a bird guidebook is, however accurate, not an explanation of anything of interest to biologists (e.g., the development,characteristic features, or behaviour of that species). Instead, such an account is "merelydescriptive". However, different models of explanation provide different accounts of what thecontrast between the explanatory and merely descriptive consists in.A related point is that while most theorists of scientific explanation have proposed models thatare intended to cover at least some cases of explanation that we would not think of as part of science, they have nonetheless assumed some implicit restriction on the kinds of explanation

they have sought to reconstruct. It has often been noted that the word “explanation” is used in awide variety of ways in ordinary English—we speak of explaining the meaning of a word,explaining the background to philosophical theories of explanation, explaining how to bake a pie, explaining why one made a certain decision (where this is to offer a justification) and so on.Although the various models discussed below have sometimes been criticized for their failure tocapture all of these forms of “explanation” (see, e.g., Scriven, 1959), it is clear that they werenever intended to do this. Instead, their intended

explicandum

is, very roughly, explanations of

why

things happen, where the “things” in question can be either particular events or somethingmore general—e.g., regularities or repeatable patterns in nature. Paradigms of this sort of explanation include the explanation for the advance in the perihelion of mercury provided byGeneral Relativity, the explanation of the extinction of the dinosaurs in terms of the impact of alarge asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous period, the explanation provided by the police for whya traffic accident occurred (the driver was drinking and there was ice on the road), and thestandard explanation provided in economics textbooks for why monopolies will, in comparisonwith firms in perfectly competitive markets, raise prices and reduce output.Finally, a few words about the broader epistemological/ methodological background to themodels described below. Many philosophers think of concepts like “explanation”, “law”,“cause”, and “support for counterfactuals” as part of an interrelated family or circle of conceptsthat are “modal” in character . For familiar “empiricist” reasons, Hempel and many other earlydefenders of the

DN

model regarded these concepts as not well understood, at least prior toanalysis. It was assumed that it would be “circular” to explain one concept from this family interms of others from the same family and that they must instead be explicated in terms of other concepts from outside the modal family—concepts that more obviously satisfied (what weretaken to be) empiricist standards of intelligibility and testability. For example, in Hempel'sversion of the

DN

model, the notion of a “law” plays a key role in explicating the concept of “explanation”, and his assumption is that laws are just regularities that meet certain further conditions that are also acceptable to empiricists. As we shall see, these empiricist standards (andan accompanying unwillingness to employ modal concepts as primitives) have continued to playa central role in the models of explanation developed subsequent to the

DN

model.There are many interesting historical questions about the

DN

model that remain largelyunexplored. Why did “scientific explanation” emerge when it did as a major topic for philosophical discussion? Why were the “logical empiricist”philosophers of science whodefended the

DN

model so willing to accept the idea that science provides “explanations”, giventhe tendency of many earlier writers in the positivist tradition to think of “explanation” as arather subjective or “metaphysical” matter and to contrast it unfavorably with “description”,which they regarded as a more legitimate goal for empirical science? And why was discussion, atleast initially, organized around “explanation” rather than “causation”, since (as we shallobserve) it is often the latter notion that seems to be of central interest in subsequent debates andsince the former notion seems (to many contemporary sensibilities) somewhat vague and ill-defined? At least part of the answer to this last question seems to be that (again as explained inmore detail below) Hempel and other defenders of the

DN

model inherited standard empiricist or Humean scruples about the notion of causation. They assumed that causal notions are only(scientifically or metaphysically) acceptable to the extent that it is possible to paraphrase or re-describe them in ways that satisfied empiricist criteria for meaningfulness and legitimacy. Oneobvious way of doing this was to take causal claims to be tantamount to claims about theobtaining of “regularities” (that is patterns of uniform association in nature). It is just this ideathat is captured by the

DN

model (see below). Part of the initial appeal of the topic of “scientific

of 00

Leave a Comment