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Purely Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power: A Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2022

William Roche  and
Elliott Sober
William Roche*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, US
Elliott Sober
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, WI, US
*
*Corresponding author. Email: w.roche@tcu.edu
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Abstract

All extant purely probabilistic measures of explanatory power satisfy the following technical condition: if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ∼H1) < Pr(E | ∼H2), then H1’s explanatory power with respect to E is greater than H2’s explanatory power with respect to E. We argue that any measure satisfying this condition faces three serious problems—the Problem of Temporal Shallowness, the Problem of Negative Causal Interactions, and the Problem of Nonexplanations. We further argue that many such measures face a fourth problem—the Problem of Explanatory Irrelevance.

Type
Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 129 - 149
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

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