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Explanatory unification and conceptualization

Synthese 192 (11):3695-3717 (2015)

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  1. Explanation = Unification? A New Criticism of Friedman’s Theory and a Reply to an Old One.Roche William & Sober Elliott - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (3):391-413.
    According to Michael Friedman’s theory of explanation, a law X explains laws Y1, Y2, …, Yn precisely when X unifies the Y’s, where unification is understood in terms of reducing the number of independently acceptable laws. Philip Kitcher criticized Friedman’s theory but did not analyze the concept of independent acceptability. Here we show that Kitcher’s objection can be met by modifying an element in Friedman’s account. In addition, we argue that there are serious objections to the use that Friedman makes (...)
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  • Studying Controversies: Unification, Contradiction, Integration.Stefan Petkov - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (1):103-128.
    My aim here is to show that approximate truth as a paraconsistent notion can be successfully incorporated into the analysis of scientific unification, thus advancing towards a more realistic representation of theory development that takes into account the controversies that often loom alongside the progress of research programmes. I support my analysis with a case study of the recent debate in ecology centred around the existence of the paradox of enrichment and the controversy between ecological models of predation that employ (...)
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  • Explanatory unification and natural selection explanations.Stefan Petkov, Wei Wang & Yi Lei - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (5):705-725.
    The debate between the dynamical and the statistical interpretations of natural selection is centred on the question of whether all explanations that employ the concepts of natural selection and drift are reducible to causal explanations. The proponents of the statistical interpretation answer negatively, but insist on the fact that selection/drift arguments are explanatory. However, they remain unclear on where the explanatory power comes from. The proponents of the dynamical interpretation answer positively and try to reduce selection/drift arguments to some of (...)
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  • How to use fitness landscape models for the analysis of collective decision-making: a case of theory-transfer and its limitations.Peter Marks, Lasse Gerrits & Johannes Marx - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (1):7.
    There is considerable correspondence between theories and models used in biology and the social sciences. One type of model that is in use in both biology and the social sciences is the fitness landscape model. The properties of the fitness landscape model have been applied rather freely in the social domain. This is partly due to the versatility of the model, but it is also due to the difficulties of transferring a model to another domain. We will demonstrate that in (...)
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