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Scientific w-Explanation as Ampliative, Specialized Embedding: A Neo-Hempelian Account

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Abstract

The goal of this paper is to present and defend an empiricist, neo-Hempelian account of scientific explanation as ampliative, specialized embedding. The proposal aims to preserve what I take to be the core of Hempel’s empiricist account, by weakening it in some respects and strengthening it in others, introducing two new conditions that solve most of Hempel’s problems without abandoning his empiricist strictures. According to this proposal, to explain a phenomenon is to make it expectable by introducing new conceptual/ontological machinery and using special, and non-ad hoc, non-accidental regularities. The new conditions are elaborated making essential use of two central structuralist ideas, namely T-theoreticity and specialization. I first introduce and qualify the project, then present the new account in detail and assess it vis-à-vis its rivals, and finally discuss some possible objections, concluding that the account fares better than its monistic rivals and well enough to qualify as a promising neo-Hempelian account. Even for those unpersuaded by its monistic goals, it has the merit of calling attention to two new necessary conditions not explicitly emphasized thus far and showing how they serve to answer many of the criticisms addressed against Hempel’s account.

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Notes

  1. Cf. e.g. “The prospect of any one of these [monistic] models being developed to cover all good scientific explanations (let alone good explanations in general) are dim. Perhaps we should opt for pluralism. Perhaps there are several types of explanation, each with its appropriate model” (Newton-Smith 2000, 132); cf. also Cartwright (1991), Thalos (2002), Goodfrey-Smith (2003) ch. 13, Reiss (2009), and even on some occasions Salmon, e.g. Salmon (2001) Douglas (2009) defends also a moderate, monistic account, but in terms of novelty; for reasons that will become apparent, I do not think that leading to novel predictions is conceptually necessary for explanatoriness.

  2. This is part of the wider problem of “theory choice,” other aspects of which I will not consider here either; cf., e.g., Thagard (1978), Kuhn (1983), Hempel (1983), Salmon (1990) and more recently the Bayesian literature.

  3. I will also leave out Scriven (1962) and other singularist criticisms, for they do not provide new counterexamples but, rather, a different interpretation of the same, ink-table kind of examples. A general defense against singularism goes beyond the limits of this paper, but in any event the proposal defended here, appropriately reformulated, aims at be of interest even for singularists.

  4. This will be useful to our dialectics, but it does not mean that causalists in general see themselves as modifying/improving Hempel’s project. Most do not. As for unificationism, although Kitcher explicitly considers that explanatory stores are constituted by arguments, other versions of unificationism may not preserve this inferential component strictly understood (e.g. Forge 2002, more on this below).

  5. Although one can use unification to raise some realist concerns (cf. Duhem 1893; Psillos 1999; and even Friedman 1974).

  6. These simplified descriptions do not take idealization into account, i.e., that theoretical models defined by the laws never apply exactly to the phenomena (Cartwright 1983); for a structuralist treatment of idealization, cf. Balzer et al. (1987) ch. VII.

  7. This does not mean that observation (and the associated observational/non-observational distinction) does not matter for the justification of theories and their cognitive content. It does matter, but observation enters into theories in a more complicated manner than is traditionally considered to be the case, i.e. not simply by having some concepts in theory’s laws that are observational (for the indirect manner in which observation enters cognitive content cf. Díez 2002a, 2006).

  8. Although T-data may very well be theory-laden, they are not T-laden; i.e., they may presuppose another theory T’, and thus be T’-theoretical, but they do not presuppose the very same theory in which they play the role of data (classical kinematics presupposes many principles in the measurement of space and time—independence of each other, linearity of light, length being independent of speed, and others—but does not presuppose that dynamical laws are correct). In this sense data models are the explananda (and also the data for testing/conforming the theory), and thus explananda do not involve T-theoretical, i.e. T-dependent, values. There is a broader sense of data model, emphasized by Gähde (see this volume), according to which DM may include theoretical values, which means that sometimes we calculate T-theoretical values from T-non theoretical data (and other T-theoretical ones). In this broader sense, our explananda are always data models but not the other way around.

  9. Insofar as the explananda are real positions of planets. If they were “apparent” retrograde trajectories, then predictions using (either geocentric or heliocentric) real positions could be explanatory.

  10. In fact, Ptolemy’s astronomy had several quite specific and systematic specializations, cf. Almagest (Toomer 1998) IX, 3 and 6, and X, 5.

  11. I thank S. Ginnobili for pointing out this possibility, and the example, to me.

  12. For instance, we explain the change in moths’ wing color from white to dark in the Sheffield industrial area during the 1960 s by appealing to the fact that moths’ habitat, tree’s trunks in the Sheffield area, became dark during the 1960 s because of the pollution, and thereby dark wing variations performed better the function of escaping predators, which is an adaptive function, i.e. beneficial for differential reproduction. That the function/behavior is adaptive, i.e. that it is relevant for fitness, is NS-theoretical, but this does not mean that the very identification of the function presupposes the NS concept of adaptation. In this case, then, the explanandum involves only part of the NS-non theoretical machinery and the explanans includes NS-theoretical concepts together with some NS-non theoretical ones. The unusual thing is not that the explanans includes T-non theoretical concepts, this happens for instance in CM when one explains spatial displacement using masses, forces and a time interval; in other explanations time is in the explanandum and space in the explanans. What is unusual is that in NS some NS-non theoretical concepts, such as “escaping predators”, are never involved in an explanandum. NS does not (aim to) explain that some species escape predators, or get adequate food supply, or that sexual rivals compete, etc.; the theory uses these functions/behaviors only for explaining, together with NS-theoretical concepts, evolution of traits. In this case explanations seem to be inter-theoretical, with more than one theory contributing to the explanatory machinery. And this might be the case in other theories as well. Unusual as they may be, the analysis cannot exclude these cases, so ASE makes room for them.

  13. One might argue that ASE is not a rival of unificationism but a version of it. Though I acknowledge that the net-like structure gives a certain unificationist flavor, ASE strongly departs from standard unificationism in not demanding simplicity as a conceptual requirement. On the other side, Kitcher’s inference patterns and filling instructions might seem similar to the net-like hierarchy and specialization relation, but it is not: if I understand them well, argument patterns and filling instructions would apply even to our bottom laws in the theory-net, so Kitcher’s filling instructions do not correspond to strcuturalist specializations.

  14. For an overview of different alternatives of how to fix the problem of the dependence of the best system on the primitive concepts/kinds, and a relativist proposal (which according to the authors is not harmful), cf. Cohen and Callender (2009).

  15. I thank M. O’Lery and S. Barberis, respectively, for pointing these last two cases to me.

  16. That ASE’s constraints are conceptual is essential, for even a radical pragmatist such as van Fraassen may accept that, as a matter of fact, there are constraints which are contingently common to all contexts (cf. van Fraassen 1977, 1980).

  17. This pragmatic component is related to, as far as I understand it, Longino’s (2002) criteria for objectivity.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this work has been funded by the research projects FFI2008-01580 and FFI2012-37354/Consolider Ingenio CSD2009-0056 (Spanish Government) and a fellowship from the AGAUR (Catalan Government) for a research stay during the spring term 2011 at CPS, University of Pittsburgh. I want to thank H. Andreas, J. Brown, M. Dorato, R. Frigg, S. Ginnobili, C. Hoefer, P. Humphreys, A. Iacona, K. Khalifa, P. Kitcher, B. Leuridan, C. Marchioni, C. U. Moulines, J. Pages, D. Teira, J. Reiss, A. Sole, J. Worrall, J. Zamora, F. Zenker and two anonymous referees of this journal for very helpful comments and criticisms on previous versions of this paper. The core idea was sketchily presented for the first time in a conference on Wesley Salmon’s work in 2001 in Ferrol, Spain (published in Spanish as Díez 2002b), just a few months before his untimely death; I want to specially thank professor Salmon for encouraging me to develop the project further, which I would like to dedicate to his memory.

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Díez, J. Scientific w-Explanation as Ampliative, Specialized Embedding: A Neo-Hempelian Account. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 8), 1413–1443 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9575-8

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