Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

182 Notes
43. Musgrave, Essays on Realism, 284.
44. Ibid., 285 (adapted).
45. Timothy McGrew, as we have seen (2.1.3.1), criticises Swinburne’s view of
justifi cation for denying, in effect, that the ancient Greeks would have been
justifi ed in accepting Ptolemaic astronomy. No such objection can be levelled
at the “explanationist” view I have adopted (2.1.3.2).
46. Musgrave, Essays on Realism, 285.
47. Schoen, Religious Explanations, 133.
48. Leibniz, “Principles of Philosophy,” §32.
49. Musgrave, Essays on Realism, 250 n.
50. Lycan, Judgement and Justifi cation, 130–31.
51. Ibid., 135, 148, 156, 158.
52. Ibid., 155, 158.
53. Ibid., 156.
54. Ibid., 158–59; see also 139–44.
55. Ibid., 143.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
1. As I shall argue in a moment (7.1), many philosophers regard testability as a
necessary condition of at least scientifi c explanations. I would be inclined to
go further and regard it as a necessary condition for accepting any proposed
explanation. But I would not want to make so strong a claim for all the desiderata
I am about to discuss.
2. . Lycan, “Explanation and Epistemology,” 416.
3. Hempel, “Logical Positivism,” 191.
4. Cioffi , “Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science,” 472.
5. Thomson, “Cathode Rays,” 294.
6. Popper, Logic of Scientifi c Discovery, §31 (96), §35 (103).
7. Swinburne, Is There a God?, 52.
8. Ibid., 53.
9. Davis and Falconer, J. J. Thomson, 123.
10. Worrall, “Methodology” 46.
11. As Ian McCausland points out (“Anomalies,” 283–85), this is a contestable
claim, since in 1898 Paul Gerber had already offered an explanation, using
classical, Newtonian mechanics, and it is still unclear whether a revised version
of his proposal could be made to work. (For an on-line discussion, see
Brown, “Gerber’s Gravity.”) But this fact needn’t bother us here. What is
important is that known facts could, in principle, lend support to one theory
over another.
12. Worrall, “Methodology,” 47.
13. Musgrave, Essays on Realism, 230.
14. In fact, Nicod’s criterion, as discussed by Carl Hempel (Aspects of Scientifi c
Explanation, 10–25), has to do with conditionals of the form “All As are B,”
but I am using the phrase here in an extended sense, which would make it
applicable to any hypothesis.
15. Grünbaum, “Popper vs Inductivism,” 120.
16. Hempel, Aspects of Scientifi c Explanation, 14–20. While not strictly a paradox,
it is a puzzle. What is the puzzle? Well, if an observation confi rms H 1
and if H 1 is logically equivalent to H 2 , then it also confi rms H 2 . Let’s say
that H 2 is “all ravens are black” and that H 1 is “all non-black things are
non-ravens,” then the observation of any non-black non-raven (let’s say, the
yellow cup that is sitting on my desk) will confi rm H 1 . But the problem is that