Investigating the Unity and Disunity of Scientific Explanation
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Investigating the Unity and Disunity of Scientific Explanation Erik Weber1 · Henk W. de Regt2 · Dingmar van Eck1,3
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Plurality of Structures in Scientific Explanation The starting point for this special issue is that explanations as they occur in scientific practice exhibit a plurality of structures. The explananda are at different levels (e.g. events, regularities, laws) and of different types (e.g. plain facts, contrasts, similarities). Likewise, the explanantia can have different ingredients (e.g. causes, constraints, laws, mechanisms) and different types of organisation (e.g. deductive and/or inductive arguments, causal models). We give a brief illustration of this plurality. We start with an example that Paul Humphreys uses in his book The Chances of Explanation (1989). Suppose that Albert has died and we want an explanation for this event. An explanation could be: Albert’s death occurred because of his infection with the plague bacillus, despite the administration of tetracycline to him. (p. 100). In this explanation, the explanans contains a positive causal factor for the explanandum (the infection) and a negative causal factor (the administration of tetracycline). Let us contrast this with an example about thermal expansion. The expansion of aluminium rods is 0 the governed by the law dL = 0.0000222 × L0 x dt, where dL is the expansion (in metre), L initial length (in metre) of the rod and dt the temperature difference (in °C). 0.0000222 is the coefficient of linear thermal expansion of aluminium. With this background knowledge we can construct the following example: C1: This aluminium rod was heated from 50 °C to 250 °C. C2: This aluminium rod has an initial length (at 50 °C) of 1 m. L: For all aluminium rods: if they are heated from 50 °C to 250 °C and their initial length is 1 m, then they are 4,44 mm longer at 250 °C.
* Erik Weber [email protected] Henk W. de Regt [email protected]
Dingmar van Eck [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
2
Institute for Science in Society, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3
Institute for Logic, Language & Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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E: This aluminium rod is 4,44 mm longer than it was before it was heated. This explanation also mentions two causes (temperature increase and initial length) but without dividing them into positive (contributing) and negative (counteracting) ones, because that distinction makes no sense here. Two other differences with the first example are that there is a covering law used here, and that the explanation has the form of an argument. In the first example there is no covering law, and the explanation does not have the form of an argument. These two examples thus illustrate that scientific explanations exhibit a plurality of structures. There are many types of explanation, with different ingredients and organisation of the exp
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