Philip Kitcher - Explanatory Unification
Explanation: some pragmatic issues
● Explanation is an activity in which we answer the actual or anticipated questions of an
actual or anticipated audience
● Explanations are not arguments
● An explanation is an ordered pair (p, explaining q). Arguments are relevant to
explanations because ‘p’ bears an appropriate relation to a particular argument
● There is a set of arguments available for explanatory purposes, and these can be referred
to as the explanatory store. The problem of explanation is to specify the conditions of this
explanatory store
● Thus, if the set of accepted scientific sentences is K, then we have to specify the set of
arguments acceptable as acts of explanation for believers of K; the set of arguments that best
unifies K
A Newtonian Program
● Newton’s successors attempted to isolate some basic force laws (analogous to Newton’s
law of universal gravitation) such that all the phenomena of nature could be derived
○ it was hoped that even chemistry could be understood in terms of
cohesive and repulsive forces
● Eventually the cause was abandoned when the seemingly invocation of numerous force
laws mean that the goal of unification appeared unlikely
● But the attempt to use one ‘kind of reasoning from mechanical principles’ (Newton)
supposed that one pattern of argument could be used again and again to derive accepted sentences
The Reception of Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory
● Darwin recognised that his theory was unable to provide a complete derivation of any
biological phenomenon, but he was nevertheless justified in claiming it had explanatory power
because it was able to sketch the derivation of a great number of biological phenomena through a
single pattern
Argument Patterns
● If one accepts an argument as explanatory, one is committed to accepting as explanatory
any arguments which instantiate the same pattern
● Arguments may exhibit patterns in different ways
○ Formal logical arguments concern themselves with logical structures;
with what sequence of sentences constitutes a valid argument through rigorous
application of rules of inference, and are unconcerned with the nonlogical terms of the
sentences
○ Scientific arguments are less concerned with identical and rigorous
logical structures (though they prefer similar logical patterns) than they are with the
nonlogical terms in the sentences e.g. force, mass, acceleration
● A schematic sentence is one obtained by replacing some of the nonlogical expressions in
a sentence with dummy letter e.g. x and y
● A set of filling instructions direct us in how to replace the dummy letters with nonlogical
terms
Explanation: some pragmatic issues
● Explanation is an activity in which we answer the actual or anticipated questions of an
actual or anticipated audience
● Explanations are not arguments
● An explanation is an ordered pair (p, explaining q). Arguments are relevant to
explanations because ‘p’ bears an appropriate relation to a particular argument
● There is a set of arguments available for explanatory purposes, and these can be referred
to as the explanatory store. The problem of explanation is to specify the conditions of this
explanatory store
● Thus, if the set of accepted scientific sentences is K, then we have to specify the set of
arguments acceptable as acts of explanation for believers of K; the set of arguments that best
unifies K
A Newtonian Program
● Newton’s successors attempted to isolate some basic force laws (analogous to Newton’s
law of universal gravitation) such that all the phenomena of nature could be derived
○ it was hoped that even chemistry could be understood in terms of
cohesive and repulsive forces
● Eventually the cause was abandoned when the seemingly invocation of numerous force
laws mean that the goal of unification appeared unlikely
● But the attempt to use one ‘kind of reasoning from mechanical principles’ (Newton)
supposed that one pattern of argument could be used again and again to derive accepted sentences
The Reception of Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory
● Darwin recognised that his theory was unable to provide a complete derivation of any
biological phenomenon, but he was nevertheless justified in claiming it had explanatory power
because it was able to sketch the derivation of a great number of biological phenomena through a
single pattern
Argument Patterns
● If one accepts an argument as explanatory, one is committed to accepting as explanatory
any arguments which instantiate the same pattern
● Arguments may exhibit patterns in different ways
○ Formal logical arguments concern themselves with logical structures;
with what sequence of sentences constitutes a valid argument through rigorous
application of rules of inference, and are unconcerned with the nonlogical terms of the
sentences
○ Scientific arguments are less concerned with identical and rigorous
logical structures (though they prefer similar logical patterns) than they are with the
nonlogical terms in the sentences e.g. force, mass, acceleration
● A schematic sentence is one obtained by replacing some of the nonlogical expressions in
a sentence with dummy letter e.g. x and y
● A set of filling instructions direct us in how to replace the dummy letters with nonlogical
terms
