In doing so we traverse the fundamental questions raised by the commentary in this special issue: What constitutes the data, what is the place of formal representations, how should linguistic comparison be done, what counts as explanation, what is the source of design in language?
He brings to the task a wide knowledge of biology and a critical eye for the kinds of accounts that can count as explanation supported by empirical evidence.
Nought to worry about Taxing judgments Against the grain Counting heads ReprintsAnother explanation is that economists were measuring the wrong thing.
That incongruity, along with the strange pattern of counting, stopping without explanation, restarting without notice, reporting a "computer failure" that still makes no sense and restarting with counting taking an entirely different direction, has frustrated Hondurans.
This ruled out an event-counting explanation for the biasing and variance-reducing effects of this dynamic stimulus.
Philosophers such as Peter Achinstein and Bas van Fraassen offered pragmatic theories, according to which what counts as an explanation is contextually determined.
To use Railton's own example, "the relevant ideal text contains more than $10^2 $words in English", if true, counts as an explanation for an episode of radioactive decay (1981, p. 246).
We see three tendencies or foci, divided by what they take to be the subject matter, the approach they advocate for studying it, and what they count as an explanation.
Examples like these suggest that not every claim that reduces uncertainty about the contents of an ideal explanatory text should be regarded as itself explanatory such a view allows too much to count as an explanation.
Indeed, on a view like Railton's, even the claim that some outcome has no causes or is governed by no laws counts as an "explanation" of that outcome, supposing that claim is true.
What we want to stress is that we are illustrating three different broad approaches to language that regard different facts as likely to be relevant, and make different assumptions about what needs to be accounted for, and what might count as an explanation.
