Abstract
In the current literature on scientific explanation unification became unfashionable in favour of causal approaches. We want to bring unification back into the picture. In this paper we demonstrate that resemblance questions do occur in scientific practice and that they cannot be properly answered without unification. Our examples show that resemblance questions about particular facts demand what we call causal network unification, while resemblance questions about regularities require what we call mechanism unification. We clarify how these types of unification relate to Philip Kitcher’s account, but also to causal and mechanistic accounts of explanation.
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Notes
See Sect. 6 for a discussion of van Fraassen’s views on why-questions. Here we only want to clarify the difference between the types of questions.
This is not a toy example. The causal relation between parental separation and smoking initiation is investigated in Kirby (2002). He uses rebelliousness as a mediating variable and presents the smoking status of the parents as another potential causal factor. So this network contains a selection from real scientific research and results.
Readers acquainted with causal graph theory (e.g., Pearl 2009) will notice that these causal networks as we use them can be graphically represented in DAG’s (directed acyclic graphs).
If our knowledge of relevant causal factor increases, this may change because an adequate explanation may become possible.
We disregard functional explanations for practical reasons. We think that the ideas we develop here in Sect. 4 can, if suitably adapted, be applied to resemblance questions about functions as well. However, showing that this really works would require a lot of additional space: function concepts have to be introduced and a case study has to be presented.
This recent book consists of two parts. First the history of anesthesia is reconstructed chronologically. In the second part the history of anesthesia is described per geographical region or per subject. We have entered the individual chapters to which we refer separately in the bibliography.
Enantiomers have identical chemical and physical properties except for their ability to rotate plane-polarized light. More info on entantiomers can be found on
http://www.chemguide.co.uk/basicorg/isomerism/polarised.html.
This is a drawback for everyone who thinks that not all explanations have to be arguments. For Kitcher all explanations are arguments, so from his perspective this is not a drawback.
Kitcher can admit that sometimes our attempts at unification do not succeed, but in his view unification is a desideratum—something we have to strive at—in all possible contexts.
Woodward may be labeled a “universal counterfactualists” with respect to causal explanations, while we limit the scope of the desideratum that he proposes to specific contexts.
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Weber, E., Lefevere, M. Unification, the answer to resemblance questions. Synthese 194, 3501–3521 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0969-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0969-9