Three Four Five quick thoughts on Wesley Salmon’s _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_, which I’m somewhat breezily reading through.

First, although there’s a discussion of functionalist explanation, it doesn’t really connect with other topics. I think that’s in part because Salmon takes it to be somewhat settled that explanations must be causal. But there’s no mention of the argument from considerations about function to that conclusion.

Second, the work in openly autobiographical in many places, so we have an example of what autobiographical analytic philosophy looks like. I find it more than a little disconcerting frankly. Maybe I should stop mixing (drinking) stories into my philosophy posts.

Third, the bibliography is ordered chronologically rather than alphabetically. For the kind of book it is this makes some sense, and it might even speed up search time for a particular piece – once you know that’s how it’s ordered of course. Maybe this should be more common practice. I like it much more than the practice one sees in the Stanford Encyclopedia sometimes of having thematic bibliographies, which makes searching for a reference very very slow.

Fourth, Peter Railton’s dissertation was 851 pages long! There’s a standard for grad students to aim for.

Fifth, Salmon often complains about theories of explanation that take the concepts CAUSE or LAW as primitive and build accounts of explanation out of them. This is dodging hard philosophical questions he says. Well true it is a dodge, but why isn’t it a permissible one? Lewis builds his account of explanation on the basis of causation, without thereby committing himself on the question of what causation is. And good thing too, or else when he changed his theory of causation (as he did from time to time) he would have to change his theory of explanation. Not all philosophers have to solve all problems all the time. I don’t understand this push within the literature on explanation to not use a philosophically loaded concept without giving a theory of it first. (“James Woodward”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/ makes a similar point in his SEP entry.)