Explanatory Aptness and Inquiry
I develop the inquiry-stage account of explanatory aptness and use it to explain why some distinctions must be preserved in an explanation while others may be abstracted away.
Research
Some true explanations are worse than others. Consider a pigeon that has been conditioned to peck when presented with red stimuli and, separately, conditioned to peck when provided food. On a particular occasion, it is presented with a scarlet stimulus and pecks. Why did it peck?
Consider three answers: one that cites scarlet, one that cites red, and one that cites either red or food. Each of these has something going for it. In fact, it is perhaps easiest to see the distinctive virtues of the first and third. The scarlet explanation is the most precise, and the disjunctive explanation is the most general. Yet explanatory practice tends to favor explanations like the second; the red explanation seems to be just right.
This is the Goldilocks problem: what makes some answers explanatorily apt while nearby alternatives are less apt?
My approach to this problem locates explanatory aptness in the structure of inquiry. The guiding idea is that why-questions arise when inquiry gets stuck, and apt explanations are those that help it move forward. As an inquiry advances, what is needed for further progress can change, which in turn can change which explanations are apt.
Papers in Progress
The Explanatory Goldilocks Problem
I argue that prominent interventionist and cohesion-based solutions to the Goldilocks problem presuppose choices about explanatory representation that they do not themselves explain, and that the problem extends beyond causal explanation.
Explanatory Aptness and the Autonomy of the Special Sciences
I argue that solving the Goldilocks problem does not by itself explain the autonomy of the special sciences, since Goldilocks aptness can be sensitive to lower-level realization while autonomous explanation can derive its value from insensitivity to such variation.