Inductive Explanation, Propensity, and Action

Abstract

The inductive aspect of scientific explanation is often ignored in philosophical and methodological studies in sociological, psychological and historical explanation. In particular, many critics of the deductive covering law model of explanation seem to implicitly assume that their arguments mutatis mutandis apply to inductive explanations as well. A more sophisticated position is held by G.H. von Wright, who does not discuss inductive explanations in his work Explanation and Understanding - except for brief and interesting comments in the introductory chapter. There von Wright explicitly states his reasons for the intentional omission of these kinds of explanations from the rest of his book; he thinks that inductive-probabilistic explanations in Hempel’s well-known model are not genuine explanations at all, but only instances of reason-giving argumentation.

I am, then, to define the meanings of the statement that the probability, that if a die be thrown from a dice box it will turn up a number divisible by three, is one-third. The statement means that the die has a certain ‘would-be’: and to say that a die has a ‘would-be’ is to say that it has a property, quite analogously to any habit that a man might have. Only the ‘would-be’ of the die is presumably as much simpler and more definite than the man’s habit as the die’s homogeneous composition and cubical shape is simpler than the nature of the man’s nervous system and soul. (Charles S. Peirce, 1910.)