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Explanation and Relevance: Comments on James G. Greeno's ‘Theoretical Entities in Statistical Explanation’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
Extract
Since Professor Greeno's paper is, to my mind, both philosophically interesting and somewhat technical, it seems to me that the most useful function I can serve as a commentator is to try to provide some of the background necessary to understand the paper, and to attempt to put his discussion in some philosophical perspective. My main aim will be to relate his discussion to the issues that have been at the forefront of the philosophical discussion of scientific explanation in recent years.
It would be hard to dispute the claim that Professor Carl HempePs work has dominated the discussion of the nature of scientific explanation for the last twenty-two years - since the publication of the classic article with Paul Oppenheim on the logic of explanation.
- Type
- Symposium: Theoretical Entities in Statistical Explanation
- Information
- PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1970 , 1970 , pp. 27 - 39
- Copyright
- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1970
Footnotes
*
Although Professor Greeno's paper is the main paper in this symposium, these comments were presented first in order to provide background for his discussion.
**
The author wishes to express gratitude to the National Science Foundation for support of research on statistical explanation.
References
Notes
1 Hempel, C. G. and Oppenheim, P., ‘Studies in the Logic of Explanation’, Philosophy of Science 15 (1948) 135-75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Hempel, C. G., ‘Deductive Nomological vs. Statistical Explanation’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (ed. by Feigl, H. and Maxwell, G.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1962Google Scholar.
3 I called attention to this danger in “The Status of Prior Probabilities in Statistical Explanation’, Philosophy of Science 32 (1965) 137-46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Salmon, W. C., ‘Statistical Explanation’ in The Nature and Function of Scientific Theories (ed. by Colodny, R.), University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1971Google Scholar, footnote 7, for an elaboration of some of the salient differences.
4 Rescher, N. (ed.), Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht-Holland, 1969CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Philosophy of Science 37 (1970) 279-93.Google Scholar
8 Op. cit.
7 The features of his theory to which I shall refer are present in Logical Foundations of Probability, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1950Google Scholar; 2nd edition, 1962.
8 Some of these were detailed in my remarks, ‘Who Needs Inductive Acceptance Rules’, in The Problem of Inductive Logic (ed. by Lakatos, I.), North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1968CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See, for example, Hintikka, J., ‘A Two-dimensional Continuum of Inductive Methods’, in Aspects of Inductive Logic (ed. by Hintikka, J. and Suppes, P.), North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1966Google Scholar.
10 Op. cit., pp. xv-xx.
11 With apologies to Professor Greeno for the associations that already surround the expression ‘S-R’ in psychological circles.
12 Logarithms to the base two are used in information theory to get the value one for the bit. Greeno uses natural logarithms in his computations, but that makes no difference in principle, for there is an elementary conversion rule.
13 In writing the arguments of the probability function in this order I am conforming to Greeno's usage; I usually follow Reichenbach in writing them in the reverse order.
14 Independence is a symmetrical relation if none of the probabilities equals zero.
15 The following measure is essentially that used in my paper ‘Statistical Explanation’ as a measure of degree of inhomogeneity of the reference class.
16 This happy term is due to Hans Reichenbach who introduced it in his posthumous work The Direction of Time University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956, p. 189. I have used it extensively in ‘Statistical Explanation’.