| Phi 272 Fall 2013 |
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This assignment consists of a short article and a few pages from a longer one. The short one is a discussion of a book by Salmon; and, in it, Kitcher comments on a number of examples of the sort you’ve seen Salmon discuss. Kitcher ends that discussion with brief comments pointing to his own account of explanation, and I’ve also assigned part of another article where he lays out his view. (From the latter, it’s enough to read the two paragraphs on p. 10 and then the last few paragraphs of §2, starting on p. 12, followed by §§3-4, pp. 12-15.)
• Kitcher’s discussion of Salmon’s book in “Two Approaches to Explanation” addresses two sides of Salmon’s account, probability in §I and causality in §§II-III. In the case of §I, think through the examples, comparing Kitcher’s view of them to Salmon’s and to your own. Since we haven’t seen the causal side of Salmon’s view (which he mentioned only in a single sentence in “Explaining Things Probabilistically,” near the top of p. 212), we probably won’t discuss the issues Kitcher raises in §III. On the other hand, §II is important because it begins to show what Kitcher has in mind in his title for the article. Watch for references to unification near the end of the section, and look for connections with his more explicit discussion of this in §IV.
• The second article is one of the places where Kitcher has tried to work out his ideas about the importance of unification for explanation. What I have assigned is his introductory discussion via three examples. The two paragraphs on p. 510 and the last paragraphs of §2 on p. 512 work with a semi-historical example of Galileo (who had served as a consultant to the Venice arsenal and was the first to prove the principle Kitcher mentions, but only some decades after gunners had become convinced of its truth). Sections 3 and 4 then present further examples, concerning Newton’s successors and Darwin.