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(2000) Synthese 122 (3).
In a series of articles, Paul Thagard has developed a connectionist's modelfor the evaluation of explanatory coherence for competing systems ofhypotheses. He has successfully applied it to various examples from thehistory of science and common language reasoning. However, I will argue thathis formalism does not adequately represent explanatory relations betweenmore than two propositions.In this paper, I develop a generalization of Thagard's approach. It is notsubject to the connectionist paradigm of neural nets, but is based on fuzzylogic: Explanatory coherence increases with the fuzzy truth value of theconjunction of explanans and explanandum and decreases with the value of theconjunction of explanans and the negation of the explanandum.
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Schoch, D. (2000). A fuzzy measure for explanatory coherence. Synthese 122 (3), pp. 291-311.
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