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Carol Cleland, University of Colorado at Boulder

Friday, January 30, 2015 - 3:00pm

402 Cohen Hall

In earlier work I sketched an account of the structure and justification of ‘prototypical’ historical natural science that distinguishes it from ‘classical’ experimental science. This talk expands upon this work, focusing upon the close connection between explanation and justification in the historical natural sciences. I argue that confirmation and disconfirmation in these fields depends primarily upon the explanatory (vs. predictive or retrodictive) success or failure of hypotheses vis-à-vis empirical evidence. The account of historical explanation that I defend is a version of common cause explanation. Common cause explanation has long been justified by appealing to the principle of the common cause. Many philosophers of science (e.g., Sober and Tucker) find this principle problematic, however, because they believe that it is either purely methodological or strictly metaphysical.  I defend a third possibility:  The principle of the common cause derives its justification from a physically pervasive time asymmetry of causation (aka the asymmetry of overdetermination). I argue that explicating the principle of the common cause in terms of the asymmetry of overdetermination illuminates some otherwise puzzling features of the practices of historical natural scientists.

Paper Title

Prediction and Explanation in the Historical Natural Sciences