Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-lrblm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-29T02:45:11.629Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Explanatory Coherence of Continental Drift

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Paul Thagard  and
Gregory Nowak
Paul Thagard
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Gregory Nowak
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the nineteen-sixties, plate tectonics became the accepted theoretical framework in the earth sciences. This framework revived the idea of continental drift that had been first proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener (1966). This paper offers an analysis of the arguments of Wegener and his opponents. We shall show that from Wegener’s perspective his hypotheses possessed a high degree of explanatory coherence, while from the opponents’ perspective his theory was incoherent with much that was generally known.

Our analysis uses a new theory of explanatory coherence that has already been applied to several important cases in the history of science: Lavoisier’s argument for his oxygen theory against the phlogiston theory, Darwin’s argument for the theory of evolution by natural selection, and current disputes about why dinosaurs became extinct (Thagard 1988b). This theory is implemented in a connectionist computer program called ECHO that takes statements of explanatory relations as input and creates a network of units, crudely analogous to neurons, with excitatory and inhibitory links among them.

Type
Part IV. History of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 118 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Giere, R. (1988). Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harman, G. (1973). Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Harman, G. (1986). Change in View. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, D., and McClelland, J. (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing. 2 vols. Cambridge: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, H. (1945). Administrative Behavior. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Thagard, P. (1978). “The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice.” Journal of Philosophy, 75 (1978): 76–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. (1988a). Computational Philosophy of Science. Cambridge: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. (1988b). “Explanatory Coherence.” Cognitive Science Laboratory Report 16. Princeton University.Google Scholar
van der Gracht, W., et al. (1928). Theory of Continental Drift. Tulsa, Oklahoma: American Association of Petroleum Geologists.Google Scholar
Wegener, A. (1966). The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Trans. by Biram, J. of Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, fourth revised German edition, 1929. New York: Dover.Google Scholar