Unification, Reduction, and Non-Ideal Explanations

This paper represents a response to the criticisms made by Eric Barnes in “Explanatory Unification and the Problem of Asymmetry” and “Explanatory Unification and Scientific Understanding” against the thesis of Explanatory Unification. This paper responds to Barnes‟ two main criticisms, that of derivational skepticism and causal asymmetry, and successfully refutes his objections. This paper also defends the plausibility of the unificationist account of scientific explanation because of its ability to render coherent the notion of scientific understanding, focusing in particular on the work by Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher.

2010

In the literature on scientific explanation, there is a classical distinction between explanations of facts and explanations of laws. This paper is about explanations of facts. Our aim is to analyse the role of unification in explanations of this kind. We discuss five positions with respect to this role, argue for two of them and refute the three others.

Noûs, 1994

Synopsis: The following is an essay on the notion of scientific explanation as unification. In it a new notion of (logical) content is used to explicate Michael Friedman's notion of "k-atomicity," and to explicate the notion of the surplus content of hypothesis h relative to evidence e. From this basis an analysis of unification as theoretical reduction is advanced. A second notion of unification, unification as reconciling prima facie incompatible statements, is introduced again with the aid of this new notion of content. More generally, it is argued that rather than seek the essence of scientific explanation we should carefully catalog the various distinct explanatory virtues. Finally it is argue that in particular philosophical explanations put a high premium on the quality of unification through showing how to make compatible seemingly irreconcilable claims.

There are several important criticisms against the unificationist model of scientific explanation: (1) Unification is a broad and heterogeneous notion and it is hard to see how a model of explanation based exclusively on unification can make a distinction between genuine explanatory unification from cases of ordering or classification. (2) Unification alone cannot solve the asymmetry and irrelevance problems. (3) Unification and explanation pull in different directions and should be decoupled, because for good scientific explanation extra ad explanandum information is often required. I am presenting a possible solution to those problems, by focusing on an often overlooked but important element of how theoretic unification is achieved—the conceptual frameworks of theories. The core conceptual assumptions behind theories are decisive for discriminating between explanatory and non-explanatory unification. The conceptual framework is also flexible enough to balance the tension between informativeness and maximum systematization in constructing explanatory inferences. A short case study of orthogenetic and Darwinian explanations in paleontology is presented as an illustration of how my addition to the unificationist model is applicable to a historical debate between rival explanations.

The articulation of an overarching account of scientific explanation has long been a central preoccupation for the philosophers of science. Although a while ago the literature was dominated by two approaches—a causal account and a unificationist account—today the consensus seems to be that the causal account (in one of its forms) has won. In this paper, I challenge this consensus and attempt to revive unificationism. More specifically, I aim to accomplish three goals. First, I add new criticisms (partly based on historical episodes) to the standard anti-unificationist arguments, in order to motivate the need for a revision of the doctrine. Second, and most importantly, I sketch such a revised version. Then I argue that, contrary to widespread belief (and in agreement with a small minority), the causal account and this revised unificationist account of explanation are compatible. Moreover, I also maintain that the unificationist account has priority, since a most satisfactory theory of explanation can be obtained by incorporating the causal account (properly spelled out), as a sub-component of the unificationist account. The driving force behind this reevaluation of the received view in the philosophy of explanation is a reconsideration of the role of scientific understanding.

2023

We discuss two influential views of unification: mu- tual information unification (MIU) and common origin unification (COU). We propose a simple probabilistic measure for COU and compare it with Myrvold’s (2003, 2017) probabilistic measure for MIU. We then explore how well these two measures perform in simple causal settings. After highlighting several deficiencies, we propose causal constraints for both measures. A comparison with explanatory power shows that the causal version of COU is one step ahead in simple causal settings. However, slightly increasing the complexity of the underlying causal structure shows that both measures can easily disagree with explanatory power. The upshot of this is that even sophisticated causally constrained measures for unification ultimately fail to track explanatory relevance. This shows that unification and explanation are not as closely related as many philosophers thought. Citation information: Gebharter, A. & Feldbacher-Escamilla, C. J. (2023). Unification and explanation from a causal perspective. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 99, 28-36. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2022.12.005

In this paper significant challenges are raised with respect to the view that explanation essentially involves unification. These objections are raised specifically with respect to the well-known versions of unificationism developed and defended by Michael Fried-man and Philip Kitcher. The objections involve the explanatory regress argument and the concepts of reduction and scientific understanding. Essentially, the contention made here is that these versions of unifica-tionism wrongly assume that reduction secures understanding.

In this paper I investigate unification as a virtue of explanation. In the first part of the paper (sec. 1-2) I give a brief exposition of the unification account of and Schurz (1999). I illustrate the advantages of this account in comparison to the older unification accounts of Friedman (1974) and . In the second part (sec. 3) I discuss several comments and objections to the Schurz-Lambert account that were raised by Weber and van Dyck , Gijsbers (2007) and de Regt (2005). In the third and final part (sec. 4), I argue that explanation should be understood as a prototype concept which contains nomic expectability, causality and unification as prototypical virtues of explanations, although none of these virtues provides a sufficient and necessary "defining condition" of explanation.

Synthese, 2002

Explanations contribute to our understanding of the world byembedding phenomena into general nomic patterns that we recognize in the world. Manyof these patterns are, of course, causal ones, but the declaration as ``causal'' often fails to determinethe explanatory power of the pattern. More important is the systematization capacity and the empiricalcontent of the pattern or theory with respect to explanations. We can specify these parameters moreprecisely within the framework of the structuralist view of theories.

Philosophy of Science, 1999

According to Philip Kitcher, scientific unification is achieved via the derivation of numerous scientific statements from economies of argument schemata. I demonstrate that the unification of selection phenomena across the domains in which it is claimed to occur, evolutionary biology, immunology and, speculatively, neurobiology, is unattainable on Kitcher's view. I then introduce an alternative method for rendering the desired unification based on the concept of a mechanism schema which can be integrated with Wesley Salmon's causal-mechanical model of explanation. I conclude that the gain in unification provided by the alternative account suggests that Kitcher's view is defective.