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A Fuzzy Measure for Explanatory Coherence

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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.

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  1. Department 5.1 – Philosophy, P.O. Box 15 11 50, D-66041, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Daniel Schoch

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  1. Daniel Schoch
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Schoch, D. A Fuzzy Measure for Explanatory Coherence. Synthese 122, 291–311 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005230112028

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005230112028

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