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On an Information-Theoretic Model of Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

James Woodward
James Woodward*
Affiliation:
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology
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Abstract

This paper is an assessment of an attempt, by James Greeno, to measure the explanatory power of statistical theories by means of the notion of transmitted information (It). It is argued that It has certain features that are inappropriate in a measure of explanatory power. In particular, given a statistical theory T with explanans variables Si and explanandum variables Mj, it is argued that no plausible measure of explanatory power should depend on the probability P(Si) of occurrence of initial conditions in the systems to which T applies or the magnitudes of the conditional probabilities P(Mj/Si), in the manner in which IT does.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 21 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Portions of this paper were written while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 1983. I am grateful to the Center and the University of Pittsburgh for their support. I would also like to thank Brian Barry, Ron Giere, James Greeno, Joseph Hanna, and Wesley Salmon for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

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