Explanation in Biology: Let's Razor Ockham's Razor

Abstract

When philosophers discuss the topic of explanation, they usually have in mind the following question: given the beliefs one has and some proposition that one wishes to explain, which subset of the beliefs constitutes an explanation of the target proposition? That is, the philosophical ‘problem of explanation’ typically has bracketed the issue of how one obtains the beliefs; they are taken as given. The problem of explanation has been the problem of understanding the relation ‘x explains y’. Since Hempel (1965) did so much to canonize this way of thinking about explanation, it deserves to be called ‘Hempel's problem’.