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Discussion: Salmon on Explanatory Relevance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Christopher Read Hitchcock
Christopher Read Hitchcock*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Rice University
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Abstract

One of the motivations for Salmon's (1984) causal theory of explanation was the explanatory irrelevance exhibited by many arguments conforming to Hempel's covering-law models of explanation. However, the nexus of causal processes and interactions characterized by Salmon is not rich enough to supply the necessary conception of explanatory relevance. Salmon's (1994) revised theory, which is briefly criticized on independent grounds, fares no better. There is some possibility that the two-tiered structure of explanation described by Salmon (1984) may be pressed into service, but more work would have to be done. Ironically, Salmon's difficulties are similar to those suffered by his seventeenth-century predecessors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 304 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1995

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Wes Salmon and Jim Woodward for their many discussions with me on this topic.

‡

Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, Rice University, MS 14, Houston, TX 77005-1892, USA.

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