WEEK 2.3

Question 1

what do good scientific claims do?

Answer 1

• provide answers to questions
• confer understanding
• put forth claims/predict the world

Question 2

what does the covering law model take explanations to be?

Answer 2

• arguments
• premises contain particular/general claims
• symmetrical with predictions
• rational reconstructions

Question 3

what does the covering law model encompass?

Answer 3

• deductive-nomological account
• inductive-statistical account

Question 4

what is the general problem with CLM?

Answer 4

• historical explanations are concerned with one-off events
• therefore explanations are rarely deterministic/probabilistic

Question 5

deductive-nomological account

Answer 5

• proponents: Hempel, Oppenheim, Nagel
• good explanations are arguments with
  
  • deductive validity
  • true premises
  • empiricial content
  • at least one deterministic law of nature

n.b. premises are assumed to be non-redundant

Question 6

why do Galileo’s and Kepler’s laws hold?

Answer 6

• not because they are special consequences of Newtonian laws
• instead explained by overarching Einstein theory of relativity

Question 7

why do DN explanations do?

Answer 7

increase breadth and depth of scientific understanding

• breadth = broader range of phenomena covered
• depth = phenomena more accurately described

Question 8

DN weaknesses

Answer 8

explanatory asymmetries (deduction works one way but fails in ‘backward’ derivation (e.g. flagpole example)

causal relationships indeterminable by statistics (e.g. barometer example)

not all determinsitic examples are DN (e.g. ink bottle example)

Question 9

flagpole example

Answer 9

DN only provides answer to 2

how high is the flagpole?

• it’s high because it was designed by X to be that way
• it’s Ym high as shown by length of shadow

Question 10

elliptical explanations

Question 11

confirmation theory

Answer 11

study of the conditions under which evidence supports a hypothesis and of the level of that support

Question 12

what are the 2 ways to express evidence-hypothesis relations?

Answer 12

• qualitatively
• quantitatively

Question 13

Popper’s hypothetico-deductivism

Answer 13

• corroboration not confirmation
• scientists should never reason inductively
• should instead reason:
  
  • conjecturally (in the context of discovery)
  • deductively (in the context of justification)

Question 14

upward flow of support

Answer 14

upward flow of support from true consequences to the hypothesis and auxiliaries

Question 15

divergence (between evidence and empirical consequence)

Answer 15

• Laudan and Leplin argue against hypoethetico-deductivism and the positive instance model of confirmation
• evidence doesn’t necessarily equal observational consequence
• A doesn’t entail B but A inductively supported by B