Scientific Explanation and Theories of Discovery
{'Code': '08080301', 'Directorate': {'Abbreviation': 'BIO', 'LongName': 'Direct For Biological Sciences'}, 'Division': {'Abbreviation': 'DBI', 'LongName': 'Div Of Biological Infrastructure'}}
{'SignBlockName': 'Ronald J. Overmann', 'PO_EMAI': None, 'PO_PHON': None}
Professor Glymour is examining the issue of scientific                          explanation.  In his approach, the notion of explanation has                    structural properties that are invariant across contexts.  He                   argues that this approach is preferable first because one of the                traditional aims of explanation has been to provide part of a                   strategy of discovery; that is, we should conjecture those                      hypotheses or theories that provide the best explanation of                     whatever the relevant phenomena may be.  Characterizations that                 provide structural criteria for comparing the goodness of                       explanations offer the prospect of a canon that can be applied to               aid in discovery (or to afford justification for discoveries                    already claimed) in areas of inquiry that differ in their                       substance.  If such procedures can be had they are much to be                   desired.  Second, he argues that philosophical progress is                      better made by advancing structural philosophical theories and                  investigating their limitations than by excluding them from                     consideration. Third, he has under previous NSF grants                          implemented structural criteria for goodness of explanation in                  computer programs that aid in the search for causal explanations                in a variety of different substantive domains.  Where it has been               possible to test these programs they have turned out to be                      astonishingly reliable.  He thus assumes that it is a reasonable                conjecture that certain sorts of structural criteria, properly                  employed, are reliable guides to discovery, not in every context                certainly, but in contexts that share certain general                           properties.  What is not known is why that should be.  Why                      should inference to the best explanation, or at least certain                   forms of it used in certain places, be a reliable guide to truth?                                                                                               In this grant, Professor Glymour will try to make more explicit a               particular explanation of scientific explanation and to                         investigate why, if at all, it should form part of a reliable                   procedure for scientific inquiry.  The enterprise is partly one                 of trying to make precise the intuitions that seem to be revealed               by a number of examples, in part the enterprise is normative, and               concerned with why preference for better explanations is a                      rational policy if one seeks the truth.  An entirely clear,                     general account of the conception of explanation has yet to be                  given and the methodological literature contains little or no                   discussion of why inferences made with it should be reliable.  It               is this "clear, general account" which is the aim of this                       project.
{'FirstName': 'Clark', 'LastName': 'Glymour', 'PI_MID_INIT': None, 'PI_SUFX_NAME': None, 'PI_FULL_NAME': 'Clark Glymour', 'EmailAddress': 'cg09@andrew.cmu.edu', 'NSF_ID': '000411023', 'StartDate': '07/01/1989', 'EndDate': None, 'RoleCode': 'Principal Investigator'}
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{'Code': '1353', 'Text': 'Hist & Philosophy of SET'}
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