| Scientific explanation is an important project in philosophy of science. When we illustrate explanation, we virtually explicate a key concept ?explanatory relevance. From the perspective of linguistics, the search for scientific explanation is mainly around three questions as follows:(l) Question about the structure of explanation. (2) Question about the relation between explanation and the world. (3) Question about the relation between explanation and context. Around those questions the author goes on the account, and investigates Aristotle's full but coarse idea, Hempel's covering laws model that is logically tight, Salom's fully objective statistical-relevance model, Fetzer's causal relevance model that provides adequate answers to ontic question and epistemic question. Meanwhile, the author specially points out the difficulties that those theories have to face, analyses their origins. And through introducing context, the author advances a program that looks explanation as triadic relation among theory, fact and context. The author advocates explanation is the unity of syntax orientation, semantics orientation and pragmatics orientation in linguistics, and the tree orientations are compatible.The paper has five parts. Part one simply introduces the historical origin and the present conditions of explanation. The value, the mainly purpose and the method are also defined. Part two briefly introduces the covering laws model, and mainly analyses its difficulties and their origins. Part three concisely introduces the successors' improvement and restructuring on Hempel's theory, and mainly analyses its difficulties and their origins. Part four explicates the importance of context under the direction of Van Fraaseen's pragmatics of explanation, and accounts that explaining is a speech act according to theory of speech acts. Part five the author discuses the importance of pragmatics in philosophy of science, which provides the page a background of history of philosophy of science. |
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