Identity and Unification

Abstract

How do identity explanations explain? I suggested earlier^l that one can develop alternatives to the DN model that vary in either the concept of explanation or the notion of explanatory connection. Identity explanations are just like causal explanations: in either case, if you hold to certain views about the explanations, they will turn out to be nothing but a subset of DN models. That is, they will explain by way of an inferential connection that relies on a concept of explanation as expectation. But this is not the only way to approach identity explanations. In this chapter I want to examine a view of identity explanation as relying on an explanatory concept of necessity. Identity explanation explains by showing that (in some sense) things had to be the way they were. But in trying to spell this out as a feature of all identity explanation I will argue that it shades into a completely different (but related) concept of explanation: unification.