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An Intervening Cause Counterexample to Railton's DNP Model of Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Stuart Gluck  and
Steven Gimbel
Stuart Gluck*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
Steven Gimbel*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
*
†Send reprint requests to the authors, Department of Philosophy, 347 Gilman Hall, 3400 N. Charles Street, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218-2690.
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Abstract

Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, non-pragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptible to a class of counterexamples involving intervening causes which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is ineffective in this case. However, we develop below a new version which overcomes these difficulties. Thus we claim that all of the models in this tradition, DNP included, have an equal status with respect to sufficiency.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 692 - 697
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1997

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Footnotes

‡

We would like to give special thanks to Robert Rynasiewicz and Peter Railton for extremely useful comments and discussion. Peter Achinstein, Karen Neander, Christopher Grau, Charles Choo, Stephen Dillingham, and Ray Rennard also provided helpful suggestions. Our appreciation goes to David Lunkin, who graciously created Figure 1.

References

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