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Explanatory power is the ability of a hypothesis or theory to explain the subject matter effectively to which it pertains. Its opposite is explanatory impotence . In the past, various criteria or measures for explanatory power have been proposed.
For example, explanatory power over all existing observations (criterion 3) is satisfied by no one theory at the moment. [ 10 ] Whatever might be the ultimate goals of some scientists, science, as it is currently practiced, depends on multiple overlapping descriptions of the world, each of which has a domain of applicability.
The explanatory indispensability argument [a] is an argument in the philosophy of mathematics for the existence of mathematical objects.It claims that rationally we should believe in mathematical objects such as numbers because they are indispensable to scientific explanations of empirical phenomena.
Over time, as successive modifications build on top of each other, theories consistently improve and greater predictive accuracy is achieved. Since each new version of a theory (or a completely new theory) must have more predictive and explanatory power than the last, scientific knowledge consistently becomes more accurate over time.
has explanatory power, meaning its consequences extend beyond the data it is required to explain; has unificatory power; as in its organizing otherwise confused and isolated phenomena; and is fruitful for further research. In trying to look for such theories, scientists will, given a lack of guidance by empirical evidence, try to adhere to:
It has predictive power. A linguistic theory that aims for explanatory adequacy is concerned with the internal structure of the device [i.e. grammar]; that is, it aims to provide a principled basis, independent of any particular language, for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each language. [4]
An example of mathematics' explanatory indispensability presented by Baker is the periodic cicada, a type of insect that usually has life cycles of 13 or 17 years. It is hypothesized that this is an evolutionary advantage because 13 and 17 are prime numbers. Because prime numbers have no non-trivial factors, this means it is less likely ...
For example, both Kepler's laws of the motion of the planets and Galileo's theories of motion formulated for terrestrial objects are reducible to Newtonian theories of mechanics because all the explanatory power of the former are contained within the latter.