A Critical Analysis of the Unification Account ofExplanation

Explanation is one of the most important issues in the philosophy ofscience, which many attentions have been paid to it since Aristotle. Theunification account of explanation, first presented by Friedman (1974),is one of the most discussed contemporary models. According to thisconception, scientific explanation has to show that many separatedargument patterns have basic similarities and via these similarities wecan understand related phenomena deeper. Philip Kitcher has extendedthis idea and has argued that scientific explanation aims to represent amaximum of facts and natural regularities in terms of minimum oftheoretical concepts and assumptions. According to Kitcher, a few ofargument patterns can be used in the explanation of many beliefs, andso we can show that how scientific explanation amounts tounderstanding. However, the unification account of explanation facessome problems, including the point that the relationship betweenunification and understanding is not clear. Another difficulty concernsthe relationship between explanation and the causal direction. In thispaper, after presenting the main features of the unification account ofexplanation and its merits over the classical D-N model, it will beargued that due to some problems in the unification account it seemthat the best way to round about these problems is to adopt a kind ofexplanatory “pluralism”, depending on different philosophical andscientific contexts.