نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسنده
ندارد
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
Explanation is one of the most important issues in the philosophy of
science, which many attentions have been paid to it since Aristotle. The
unification account of explanation, first presented by Friedman (1974),
is one of the most discussed contemporary models. According to this
conception, scientific explanation has to show that many separated
argument patterns have basic similarities and via these similarities we
can understand related phenomena deeper. Philip Kitcher has extended
this idea and has argued that scientific explanation aims to represent a
maximum of facts and natural regularities in terms of minimum of
theoretical concepts and assumptions. According to Kitcher, a few of
argument patterns can be used in the explanation of many beliefs, and
so we can show that how scientific explanation amounts to
understanding. However, the unification account of explanation faces
some problems, including the point that the relationship between
unification and understanding is not clear. Another difficulty concerns
the relationship between explanation and the causal direction. In this
paper, after presenting the main features of the unification account of
explanation and its merits over the classical D-N model, it will be
argued that due to some problems in the unification account it seem
that the best way to round about these problems is to adopt a kind of
explanatory “pluralism”, depending on different philosophical and
scientific contexts.
کلیدواژهها [English]
)