unificationist

The basic idea of the unificationist account is that scientific explanation is a matter of providing a unified account of a range of different phenomena.

Scientific Explanation Woodward, James 2009

Two accounts of explanation emerged: the unificationist and the causal-mechanical.

Molecular Biology Darden, Lindley 2009

Indeed, any account of explanation that, like Kitcher's unificationist model, insists that laws (or generalizations of considerable generality) and deductive structure are necessary conditions for successful explanation will need to appeal to something like hidden structure strategy since it is generally accepted that there are many apparent explanations that do not conform to such conditions in their overt structure.

Scientific Explanation Woodward, James 2009

Friedman's formulation of the unificationist idea was subsequently shown to suffer from various technical problems (Kitcher, 1976) and subsequent development of the unificationist treatment of explanation has been most associated closely with Philip Kitcher (especially Kitcher, 1989).

Scientific Explanation Woodward, James 2009

Salmon, 1989, pp. 94ff. contains a critical discussion of Friedman's version of the unificationist account of explanation but ends by advocating a

Scientific Explanation Woodward, James 2009

What we have just seen is that the unificationist account has difficulty simultaneously capturing both of these possibilities.

Scientific Explanation Woodward, James 2009

So you can choose blatant propaganda, or a neutral station run by a unificationist monk the only free Taiwan station on offer, by the way.

Daily Links, Jan 15, 2009 Michael Turton 2009

His failure in this regard is endangering all of Lien Chan's good work and the whole unificationist program.

China Post Rips Ma Administration Michael Turton 2009

Kitcher acknowledges that there is nothing in the unificationist account per se that requires that all explanation be deductive: “there is no bar in principle to the use of non-deductive arguments in the systemization of our beliefs”.

Scientific Explanation Woodward, James 2009

One possible response to this second example is to bite the bullet and to argue that from the point of view of fundamental physics, there really is no difference in the explanatory import of the retrodictive and predictive derivations, and that it is a virtue, not a defect, of the unificationist approach that it reproduces this judgment.

Scientific Explanation Woodward, James 2009