Unification, the answer to resemblance questions

Erik Weber

Merel Lefevere

pp. 3501-3521

in: Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem (ed), New thinking about scientific realism, Synthese 194 (9), 2017.

Abstract

In the current literature on scientific explanation unification became unfashionable in favour of causal approaches. We want to bring unification back into the picture. In this paper we demonstrate that resemblance questions do occur in scientific practice and that they cannot be properly answered without unification. Our examples show that resemblance questions about particular facts demand what we call causal network unification, while resemblance questions about regularities require what we call mechanism unification. We clarify how these types of unification relate to Philip Kitcher’s account, but also to causal and mechanistic accounts of explanation.

Cited authors

Kitcher Philip