Vera Shumilina presented on "The Peircean theory of scientific explanation: from three types of reasoning to the typology of scientific explanations."

On December 17, the 107th meeting of the "Formal Philosophy" theoretical research seminar took place.

Abstract
The problem of the existence of a general (universally applied, single) theory of scientific explanation (as well as the issue of construction of such theory) is considered closed (Woodward & Ross, 2021). Only a few decades have passed since its formulation by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948), when the existing pluralism of theories in various disciplines (Mancosu et al., 2023; Machamer et al., 2000) called into question the possibility of a unified theory of scientific explanation suitable for all disciplines, rather than focused on nomological physical explanations.
The ongoing debate within the epistemology of scientific explanations between epistemic (including unificationism (Friedman, 1974; Kitcher, 1981, 1989), the covering law model (Hempel, 1965), and the pragmatic approach (van Fraassen, 1980)) and ontic (causal models (Salmon, 1984; Woodward, 2003)) frameworks has shown the irrelevance of the normative attitude towards theories of scientific explanation. Moreover, the situation in the philosophy of science that had developed by the end of the 20th century was aggravated by a methodological gap with logical theories of explanation (Douven, 2025).
The talk will be dedicated to the description of a theory that enables resolutions of the contradictions of logical, methodological, and philosophical-scientific approaches to the problem of the construction of the general theory of scientific explanation. The suggested solution is based on the reconstruction of the theory of scientific explanation devised by C.S. Pierce. In turn, it is based on a typology of classes of reasoning as stages of scientific research. The suggested theory is elaborated in such a way as to meet the criteria of epistemic (the role of explanations in the context of justification, the connection of predictions and explanations) and ontic (taking into account the difference of ontic dependencies, the connection of explanation and understanding) approaches.