Wesley Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World

If the decades of the forties through the sixties were dominated by discussion of Hempel's “covering law“ explication of explanation (and its variants), that of the seventies was preoccupied with Salmon's “statistical relevance” conception, which emerged as the principal alternative to Hempel's enormously influential account. Readers of Wesley C. Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Salmon 1984), therefore, ought to find it refreshing to discover that its author has not remained content with a facile defense of his previous investigations; on the contrary, Salmon offers an original account of different kinds of explications, advances additional criticisms of various alternative theories, and elaborates a novel “two-tiered“ analysis of explanation that tacitly depends upon a “two-tiered” account of homogeneity. Indeed, if the considerations that follow are correct, Salmon has not merely refined his statistical relevance account but has actually abandoned it in favor of a “causal/mechanistic“ construction. This striking development suggests that the theory of explanation is likely to remain as lively an arena of debate in the eighties as it has been in the past

Economics · Epistemology · Explication · Political science · Positive economics · Principal (computer security) · Relevance (law) · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science

• The Foundations Of Scientific Inference

  Wesley C Salmon, Wesley Salmon•Foundations of Scientific Inference•1967

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• Aspects of Scientific Explanation

  Carl Gustav Hempel•Aspects of Scientific Explanation•1970

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• Probabilistic causality, explanation, and detection

  Open Access•Ben Roger, BEN ROGERS•Synthese•1981

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• Inductive explanation

  Open Access•Raimo Tuomela•Synthese•1981

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• A single case propensity theory of explanation

  Open Access•James H Fetzer•Synthese•1974

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• Maximal Specificity and Lawlikeness in Probabilistic Explanation

  Open Access•Carl G Hempel•Philosophy of Science•1968

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