Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

Repository | Journal | Volume | Article

237510

A fuzzy measure for explanatory coherence

Daniel Schoch

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

DOI: 10.1023/A:1005230112028

Full citation:

Schoch Daniel (2000) „A fuzzy measure for explanatory coherence“. Synthese 122 (3), 291–311.