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Explanatory Asymmetries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

James Woodward
James Woodward*
Affiliation:
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology
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Abstract

This paper examines a recent attempt by Evan Jobe to account for the asymmetric character of many scientific explanations. It is argued that a purported counterexample to Jobe's account, from Clark Glymour, is inconclusive, but that the account faces independent objections. It is also suggested, contrary to Jobe, that the explanatory relation is not always asymmetric.

Sometimes a singular sentence C can figure in a DN derivation of another singular sentence E and E can also figure in a DN derivation of C. Yet while we are inclined to regard the first derivation as an explanation of E, we are not inclined to regard the second derivation as an explanation of C. As Sylvain Bromberger pointed out in a now classic article (1966), one can explain the period of a pendulum by reference to its length and yet, although one can give a DN derivation of the length of a pendulum by reference to its period, this derivation does not seem to represent an explanation.

Evan Jobe has recently offered an interesting account of such explanatory asymmetries and Clark Glymour has in turn proposed a counterexample which seems to show that Jobe's account is defective. The aim of this paper is twofold. I shall attempt to show that (a) Glymour's proposed counterexample can be rejected on the grounds that it violates an independently plausible restriction on the role that equalities may play in DN explanation, and that (b) although Glymour's counterexample can be avoided in this way, Jobe's account is defective in several other respects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 421 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1984

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Footnotes

†

Portions of this paper were written while I was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh during Spring, 1983. I am grateful to the Center and the University of Pittsburgh for their support. I would also like to thank Robert Causey, Clark Glymour, Evan Jobe, and an anonymous referee for Philosophy of Science for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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