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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

James H. Fetzer
James H. Fetzer*
Affiliation:
Philosophy and Humanities, University of Minnesota, Duluth
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Extract

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.

Type
Critical Notice
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 597 - 610
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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