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Idealizations, Intertheory Explanations and Conditionals

  • Hans RottEmail author
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science book series (LEUS, volume 21)

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from Lakatos’s philosophy of science, the paper presents a notion of intertheory explanation that is suitable to explain, from the point of view of a successor theory, its predecessor theory’s success (where it is successful) as well as the latter’s failure (where it fails) at the same time. A variation of the Ramsey-test is used, together with a standard AGM belief revision model, to give a semantics for open and counterfactual conditionals and ’because’-sentences featuring in such intertheory explanations. Pre-theoretically described idealizing assumptions play a crucial role in this model, especially when the predecessor theory and the successor theory contradict each other.

Keywords

Belief Revision Belief Change Successor Theory Applicability Condition Nonmonotonic Logic 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PhilosophyUniversity of RegensburgRegensburgGermany

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