Unification and Explanation: Explanation as a Prototype Concept. A Reply to Weber and van Dyck, Gijsberg, and de Regt
<em></em>In this paper I investigate unification as a virtue of explanation. I the first part of the paper (sec. 1-2) I give a brief exposition of the unification account of Schurz and Lambert (1994) and Schurz (1999). I illustrate the advantages of this account in comparison to the olde...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of the Basque Country
2014-02-01
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| Series: | Theoria |
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| Online Access: | http://www.ehu.es/ojs/index.php/THEORIA/article/view/8729 |
| Summary: | <em></em>In this paper I investigate unification as a virtue of explanation. I the first part of the paper (sec. 1-2) I give a brief exposition of the unification account of Schurz and Lambert (1994) and Schurz (1999). I illustrate the advantages of this account in comparison to the older unification accounts of Friedman (1974) and Kitcher (1981). 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 (2002), Gijsberg (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. |
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| ISSN: | 0495-4548 2171-679X |