Explanatory Unification

By Thomas Bartelborth. Synthese, 2004

419 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc7747a975692641daa7c90f5744b5061f1aca5e

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In History and Philosophy of Science

Citations in the corpus

Learners' Epistemic Criteria for Good Scientific Models. (2011, background): “The second example, ‘‘shows howorwhy,’’ was coded as an instance of explanation criterion because an explanation has as a primary function giving an account of how or why things occur (Kitcher, 1981).”
Economics Imperialism (2009, neutral): “…maximizing the number of conclusions generated”; “Reducing the number of apparently separate and diverse phenomena by showing that they are manifestations of the same system of objects” (Friedman 1974; Kitcher 1981, 1989; Aronson 1984; Morrison 2000; for the case of economics, see Mäki 1990, 2001).”
Explanation and Prior Knowledge Running Head: Explanation and Prior Knowledge Explanation and Prior Knowledge Interact to Guide Learning Explanation and Prior Knowledge Interact to Guide Learning (neutral): “…of explanation in philosophy of science, according to which explanations subsume the explanandum under a law or explanatory pattern, and in so doing ideally unify disparate observations or phenomena under that law or pattern (Friedman, 1974; Kitcher, 1981; 1989; see Woodward, 2010 for review).”
Why Attention is Not Explanation: Surgical Intervention and Causal Reasoning about Neural Models (2020, background): “• Interventionist Theories of causation introduce graph theory to the representation of causal relations and emphasize the identiﬁcation of invariance relations be-tween causes and effects as the target of causal claims (Woodward, 1994; Pearl, 1995; Spirtes et al., 1983; Pearl, 2000) 1 .”
Explanatory generalizations, part II: Plumbing explanatory depth (2003, background): “In the remaining sections, we explore the differences between our account and two other influential treatments of explanation:1 Kitcher’s unificationist account (Kitcher 1981, 1989) and Lewis’s causal account (1986a).”
Qualitative Theory and Chemical Explanation (2004, background): “entire account of explanation on unity and generality (Kitcher 1981; Friedman 1974), logical empiricists (Hempel 1965), and some modern causal theorists (Strevens 2004).”
Forty Years of ‘The Strategy’: Levins on Model Building and Idealization (2007, background): “(Friedman, 1974; Kitcher, 1981) These are clearly advantages of the third strategy and may be why Levins seems to favor the strategy above the others.”
Why does explaining help learning? Insight from an explanation impairment effect (2010, background): “The account is motivated in part by “subsumption” and “unification” theories of explanation from philosophy (Friedman, 1974; Kitcher, 1981), which propose that good explanations show how what is being explained is an instance of a unifying pattern: explanations cite generalizations that subsume what”
The explanation paradox (2012, background): “Finally, the unifying power of a basis (with respect to K) varies directly with: (1) the number of conclusions that can be derived from the set of arguments it generates; and (2) the stringency of its argument patterns, and it varies inversely with the number of its members (Kitcher 1981, p. 520).”
The Causal and Unification Approaches to Explanation Unified—Causally (2004, methodology): “In the best-developed unification account of explanation, due to Philip Kitcher, an event is explained by deducing it using the theory that unifies the phenomena better than any other (Kitcher 1981, 1989).”
Scientific Explanation (2005, background): “Kitcher (1981, 1989) amends and extends Friedman's account in various ways.”
The role of explanation in discovery and generalization: evidence from category learning (2010, background): “A subset of these accounts further emphasizes unification: the value of explaining disparate observations by appeal to a single explanatory pattern (e.g., Friedman, 1974; Kitcher, 1981, 1989).”