Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-t6hkb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T14:35:54.248Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Explanatory Unification and Scientific Understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Eric Barnes
Eric Barnes*
Affiliation:
Denison University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The theory of explanatory unification was first proposed by Michael Friedman (1974) and developed in more detail by Philip Kitcher (1981,1989). The primary motivation for this theory is the case that the theory adequately accounts for the genesis of scientific understanding. Standard models of explanation are, moreover, allegedly constructed on the basis of a misconception of the nature of understanding. My thesis is that the unificationist account of understanding proposed by Friedman and Kitcher is false, and hence, that the theory of explanatory unification is fundamentally misconceived.

How does an explanation of some explanandum render the explanandum as ‘understood’? Carl Hempel wrote of the D-N covering law model that it shows that “given the particular circumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be expected; and it is in this sense that the explanation allows us to understand why the phenomenon occurred.”

Type
Part I. Methodology and Explanation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 3 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a summer seminar stipend which supported research culminating in this paper. I am indebted to Paul Humphreys both for comments on this paper and for teaching an excellent seminar.

References

Bridgman, P.W. (1968), The Logic of Modern Physics. New York: MacMillan.Google Scholar
Dray, W. (1964), Laws and Explanation in History. New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Friedman, M. (1974), “Explanation and Scientific Understanding”, Journal of Philosophy 71:5-19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanson, N.R. (1963), The Concept of the Positron. New York: Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hattiangadi, J.N. (1978), “The Structure of Problems, Part I”, Philosophy of Social Science 8: 345-365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hempel, C.G. and Oppeneheim, P. (1948), “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, Philosophy of Science 15: 135-75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hempel, C.G. (1965), Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Humphreys, P. (1989), The Chances of Explanation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P. (1976), “Explanation, Conjunction and Unification”, Journal of Philosophy 73: 207-12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, P. (1981), “Explanatory Unification”, Philosophy of Science 33: 337-59.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P.. (1989), “Explanatory Unification and the Causal Structure of the World”, in Scientific Explanation, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Kitcher, P. and Salmon, W. (eds.). Volume XIII, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 410-505.Google Scholar
Salmon, W. (1984), Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, W.. (1989), Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Scriven, M. (1970), “Explanations, Predictions, and Laws”, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Feigl, H. and G., Maxwell (eds.). Volume III. I Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Toulmin, S. (1963), Foresight and Understanding. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
van Fraasen, B. (1980), The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar