Concluding Remarks

Summary

Summing up, in this book we have been doing some explaining – we have answered a number of “why” and “how” questions. Along the way we have cleared up a number of common misunderstandings (see the summary that follows for a list of these). Most importantly, we have explained why science seeks to explain the world – because this is how we come to have scientific understanding of the world. Additionally, we have explained “how” science explains the world – quite often it is by way of idealizing models that allow us to generate scientific hypotheses which provide explanations of phenomena. Once we have scientific hypotheses that potentially explain some phenomenon, we utilize our ability to evaluate the explanatory merits of hypotheses to determine which explanation is best. Then, we legitimately infer that the best explanation, if it is sufficiently good in its own right, is (probably) true. This is how we come to have scientific knowledge, and it is this scientific knowledge of explanations and hypotheses that yields genuine scientific understanding of phenomena.