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A Defense of Low-Probability Scientific Explanations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
I evaluate the plausibility of explanatory elitism, the view that a good scientific explanation of an outcome will show that it was highly probable. I consider an argument from Michael Strevens that elitism is the only view that can account for the historical acceptance of probabilistic theories in physics. I argue that biology provides better test cases for evaluating elitism and conclude that theories in that domain were favored in virtue of conferring correct, and not necessarily high, probabilities on outcomes.
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Footnotes
†
I would like to thank several anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their guidance in shaping this article. For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I would like to thank Elliott Sober; Naftali Weinberger; audiences at Syracuse, Cornell, Rochester, and Wisconsin; and participants at the Venice Seminar on Causal and Explanatory Reasoning and the Philosophy of Biology at Madison Workshop.
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