Linguistique de l’écrit

Revue internationale en libre accès

Revue | Volume | Article

234626

Unification, the answer to resemblance questions

Erik WeberMerel Lefevere

pp. 3501-3521

Résumé

In the current literature on scientific explanation unification became unfashionable in favour of causal approaches. We want to bring unification back into the picture. In this paper we demonstrate that resemblance questions do occur in scientific practice and that they cannot be properly answered without unification. Our examples show that resemblance questions about particular facts demand what we call causal network unification, while resemblance questions about regularities require what we call mechanism unification. We clarify how these types of unification relate to Philip Kitcher’s account, but also to causal and mechanistic accounts of explanation.

Détails de la publication

Publié dans:

Ruttkamp-Bloem Emma (2017) New thinking about scientific realism. Synthese 194 (9).

Pages: 3501-3521

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0969-9

Citation complète:

Weber Erik, Lefevere Merel, 2017, Unification, the answer to resemblance questions. Synthese 194 (9), New thinking about scientific realism, 3501-3521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0969-9.