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A different strategy began by questioning the Hempelian proposal that ordinary explanations consist in explanation sketches whose force derives from an unarticulated ideal explanation.
If so, the idea that the DN/IS requirements are at least necessary conditions for ideal explanation may be defensible after all, although the counterexamples to the sufficiency of the model noted in will remain.
Using a unified theory (for example the law of universal gravitation) to connect and account for various phenomena (the gravity on the Earth and the motion pattern of celestial bodies) is an ideal explanation meeting the unificatory perspective.
Although it is tempting to explain away the survival advantage in each of these contrasts with ad hoc explanations, such intersecting perinatal mortality curves are a general phenomenon and the ideal explanation should seek to parsimoniously address all these various contrasts.
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In fact, however, Hempel's strategy of treating explanations as devices for conveying information, but in a "partial" or "incomplete" way, about underlying "ideal" explanations of a prima-facie quite different form that are at least partly epistemically hidden from those who use the original, non-ideal explanation has continued to be very popular in recent theorizing about scientific explanation.
It was perhaps Karl Popper's critique of the universal truth claim and his orientation on rational falsification that promoted the search of universal laws and ideal explanations [6].
Even the long discourse on the progress of science, started in the beginning of the 20th century, until today was not able to put the role of universal laws and ideal explanations into perspective [3, 12, 39, 40, 44, 45].
Suppose we are presented with an explanation from economics or psychology that does not appeal to any generalization that we are prepared to count as a law but that underlying this "non-ideal" explanation is some incredibly complex set of facts described in terms of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, along with the relevant laws of these theories.
The problem this raises for the hidden structure strategy is that the information associated with the hidden structure alleged to underlie "non-ideal" explanations like (2.4.1) is typically unknown or epistemically inaccessible to those who use the explanation.
This strategy forms the basis, for example, for Peter Railton's (1978 , 1981 contrast between an "ideal explanatory text" which contains all of the causal and nomological information relevant to some outcome of interest and the "non-ideal" explanations like (2.4.1 that we actually give.
Early in the 20th century, however, some prominent scholars of science were inclined to dismiss the ideal of explanation, contending that explanation is inevitably a subjective matter.
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