Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-qdpjg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-17T00:14:09.326Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

Achinstein, P. (1983), The Nature of Explanation. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cartwright, N. (1983), How the Laws of Physics Lie. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hempel, C. (1965), Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Railton, P. (1978), “A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation”, Philosophy of Science 45: 206–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Railton, P. (1981), “Probability, Explanation, and Information”, Synthese 48: 233–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmon, W. (1990), Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar