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A fuzzy measure for explanatory coherence
pp. 291-311
Abstract
In a series of articles, Paul Thagard has developed a connectionist's modelfor the evaluation of explanatory coherence for competing systems ofhypotheses. He has successfully applied it to various examples from thehistory of science and common language reasoning. However, I will argue thathis formalism does not adequately represent explanatory relations betweenmore than two propositions.In this paper, I develop a generalization of Thagard's approach. It is notsubject to the connectionist paradigm of neural nets, but is based on fuzzylogic: Explanatory coherence increases with the fuzzy truth value of theconjunction of explanans and explanandum and decreases with the value of theconjunction of explanans and the negation of the explanandum.
Publication details
Published in:
(2000) Synthese 122 (3).
Pages: 291-311
Full citation:
Schoch Daniel (2000) „A fuzzy measure for explanatory coherence“. Synthese 122 (3), 291–311.