Affiliation:
1. University of Helsinki
Abstract
Abstract
The use of idealized scientific theories in explanations of empirical facts and regularities is problematic in two ways: they don’t satisfy the condition that the explanans is true, and they may fail to entail the explanandum. An attempt to deal with the latter problem was proposed by Hempel and Popper with their notion of approximate explanation. A more systematic perspective on idealized explanations was developed with the method of idealization and concretization by the Poznan school (Nowak, Krajewski) in the 1970s. If idealizational laws are treated as counterfactual conditionals, they can be true or truthlike, and the concretizations of such laws may increase their degree of truthlikeness. By replacing Hempel’s truth requirement with the condition that an explanatory theory is truthlike one can distinguish several important types of approximate, corrective, and contrastive explanations by idealized theories. The conclusions have important consequences for the debates about scientific realism and anti-realism.
Reference47 articles.
1. Bangu, Sorin (2015), “Why Does Water Boil? Fictions in Scientific Explanation”, in Uskali Mäki et al. (eds.), Recent Developments in Philosophy of Science, Springer, Cham, 319–330.10.1007/978-3-319-23015-3_24
2. Batterman, Robert W. (2002), The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence, Oxford University Press, Oxford.10.1093/0195146476.003.0004
3. Batterman, Robert W. and Rice, Collin C. (2014), “Minimal Model Explanations”, Philosophy of Science 81, 349–376.10.1086/676677
4. Bokulich, Alisa (2011), “How Scientific Models Can Explain”, Synthese 180, 33–45.10.1007/s11229-009-9565-1
5. Bokulich, Alisa (2012), “Distinguishing Explanatory from Nonexplanatory Fictions”, Philosophy of Science 79, 725–737.10.1086/667991
Cited by
3 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Defending De-idealization in Economic Modeling: A Case Study;Philosophy of the Social Sciences;2021-12-01
2. Nagel on Idealization in Science;Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science;2021-09-22
3. Abduction and Truthlikeness;Synthese Library;2018