Re-orienting Discussions of Scientific Explanation: A Functional Perspective
Citation: Woody, A.I. (2015) Re-orienting Discussions of Scientific Explanation: A Functional Perspective. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1, 9 (RSS)
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Summary
Woody starts his argument about explanation in science with three questions: (1) adequacy conditions for individual scientific explanation, (2) the way explanatory power is justified as a theoretical virtue, and (3) main role of explanation in science. The first question should be solved first.
Most discussions occurred in field are focused on the first question, explanans-explanandum relation. Woody takes an example of Hempel and points out the limitation of it which is not clear why other people have followed the Hempel’s. He thinks that Hempel’s way can give scientific warrant to explanation.
He also uses Hempel’s assertions about functional analysis which describe that “functional analysis seeks to understand a behavior pattern or a socio-cultural institution”. He thinks that the role of explanation is helping people to understand the world around us involving a request for information and a response and assuming a functional perspective which is enable to understand. Explanation should be shared, arbitrated, or generated among most members of a given scientific discipline or sub-discipline which are largely delineated by the explanation patterns. Through the example of gas law, the author would like to say that the functional perspective provides a better platform for recognizing the law’s explanatory power. And the law provides scaffolding for reasoning about certain phenomenon, and it enables the theoretical unification of macro and micro level descriptions as well as grounds our understanding of the core concepts.
Although adopting the functional perspective has limitation such as case that is hard to contain generalization and framework or one which has possibility that framework cannot accommodate the case, it still has several virtues. Functional perspective based on multiple philosophical analyses has logic, can capture the core concept and generalized it, suggests model-based larger story, salvages significant insights from the existing philosophical literature, connects with explanation with understanding, and turns our attention to issues to issues of social epistemology with knowledge of modern science.
In sum, the answers of the questions are following: (1) The functionality of explanatory discourse is needed for scientific explanation, (2) and (3) the reasons why we prefer explanatory scientific theories are because explanation is a main goal of science, and because the explanation theories are indicative of truth.
