Different Types of Explanation and Theories of Scientific Explanation

Editorial

Author
Masoud Sadiqi
Assistant Professor at the Department of Islamic Mysticism, Research Institute of Imam Khomeini and Islamic Revolution, Tehran, Iran
10.30497/prr.2012.1181
Abstract
In philosophical literature it has been enumerated different types of explanation such as scientific and ordinary, full and partial, causal and non-causal, functional explanations. By distinguishing these different explanations from each other, this paper provides an introduction to the discussion of theories of scientific explanation. The standard view about the nature of scientific explanation is the covering law model of explanation which is further divided into two sorts: deductivenomological and inductive- probabilistic or statistical explanation. Difficulties faced by the covering model gave way to alternative models. And various alternative views about explanation have been developed, among them it can be cited Salmon's statistical relevance model which based on causal mechanism and Friedman and Kitcher's explanatory unification. This paper shows how later models avoid difficulties of earlier ones.
Keywords
types of explanation
scientific explanation
the covering law model
statistical relevance model
causal mechanism
explanatory unification
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Philosophy of Religion Research
Volume 4, Issue 2 - Serial Number 2
November 2006
Pages 45-64

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