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Explanatory Justice: The Case of Disjunctive Explanations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael Cohen
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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an effort to explicate the concept of explanatory power in a Bayesian framework by constructing explanatory measures. It has been argued that those measures should not violate the principle of explanatory justice, which states that explanatory power cannot be extended “for free.” I argue, by formal means, that one recent measure claiming to be immune from explanatory injustice fails to be so. I end by concluding that the explanatory justice criticism can be dissolved, given a natural interpretation of the concept of negative explanatory power.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 442 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†.

I would like to thank Jan Sprenger for his comments on an earlier draft. Thanks also to the reviewers of this journal for helpful comments.

References

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