Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

28 Theism and Explanation
clarifi ed what I mean by a potential explanation. Let me begin by returning
for a moment to Peirce’s schema.
(1) The surprising fact, E, is observed.
(2) But if H were true, E would be a matter of course,
(3) Hence, there is reason to suspect that H is true.
I have argued that a potential explanation is an account that satisfi es the
second premise (line 2) of Peirce’s schema. Now Peirce’s schema as a whole
tells us what might warrant our acceptance of a proposed explanation. But
it tells us nothing about the shape of the explanation itself. It does not tell
us just what it means to say that “if H were true, E would be a matter of
course” (line 2).
There are two ways in which this question has commonly been answered.
The fi rst is to argue that H entails E, the explanation in question taking
the form of a deductive argument. I shall refer to this as a “deductivist”
approach to explanation. The second is to argue that H renders E more
likely than it would be otherwise. More precisely, this approach argues that
truth of H makes E more likely than it would be if H were not true:
Pr(E|H) > Pr(E|H).
I shall refer to this as a “probabilistic” approach to explanation. Among
proponents of theistic explanations, Richard Swinburne adopts the probabilistic
approach. While recognising that theistic explanations are intentional
explanations, 46 his arguments assume that the existence of a divine
agent would render the explanandum more likely that it would be otherwise.
I shall examine Swinburne’s arguments in more detail later (6.1.2).
All I want to note here is that I shall be adopting the fi rst, deductivist view.
This is not because I believe that all explanations can be reduced to deductive
arguments. (Perhaps they can; perhaps they can’t. I’m not sure.) It is because
proposed theistic explanations are a species of intentional explanation and
intentional explanations, I shall argue (Appendix 2.1), are best reconstructed
as deductive arguments. From a deductivist point of view, if one can deduce
a description of the explanandum from the hypothesis, then one’s hypothesis
corresponds to the second premise (line 2) of Peirce’s schema. It will show
why, given the truth of H, we would expect to observe E.
Note that, assuming that one can make sense of the relevant notion of
probability (2.1.3.1), a deductivist approach to explanation does not necessarily
exclude probability calculations. It is true that, on this view, the
explanation itself would not be probabilistic, in the sense of assigning a
certain probability to the explanandum (perhaps in the light of a statistical
law). If the deductive argument it embodies is sound, then the likelihood
of the explanandum, given the hypothesis, is 1.0. If one wanted to speak
of “confi rmation” in this context (perhaps adopting Hempel’s entailment