Explanatory Justice: The Case of Disjunctive Explanations

Philosophy of Science 85 (3):442-454 (2018)
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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an effort to explicate the concept of explanatory power in a Bayesian framework by constructing explanatory measures. It has been argued that those measures should not violate the principle of explanatory justice, which states that explanatory power cannot be extended “for free.” I argue, by formal means, that one recent measure claiming to be immune from explanatory injustice fails to be so. I end by concluding that the explanatory justice criticism can be dissolved, given a natural interpretation of the concept of negative explanatory power.

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Michael Cohen
Tilburg University

Citations of this work

Bayesian Philosophy of Science.Jan Sprenger & Stephan Hartmann - 2019 - Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Mess in Science and Wicked Problems.Jutta Schickore - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (4):482-504.
Against Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Quality.Marc Lange - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (2):252-267.

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References found in this work

The Logic of Scientific Discovery.Karl Popper - 1959 - Studia Logica 9:262-265.
Studies in the logic of explanation.Carl Gustav Hempel & Paul Oppenheim - 1948 - Philosophy of Science 15 (2):135-175.
The Logic of Explanatory Power.Jonah N. Schupbach & Jan Sprenger - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (1):105-127.
Confirmation, heuristics, and explanatory reasoning.Timothy McGrew - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (4):553-567.

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