Abstract

Scientific explanationScientific explanations cannot take place outside a context and each context has its own hierarchy among competing explanations. The lexicographic ordering among explanations help us rank the relevance of each possible explanation not with respect to a certain set of value judgments but with respect to the available evidence; the more relevant an explanation is, the higher is placed in the ordering. The notion of explanatory indexicals is introduced and is described as a set that involves terms which are unique under each context. The informationInformation these terms carry can be used to help us construct the lexicographic hierarchy. This approach captures many episodes of scientific explanationScientific explanations including explanations induced by false propositions as well as non-causalNon-causal explanations. It furthermore evades problems that probabilistic theories of explanatory virtues face such as the lottery paradoxLottery paradoxes and is not laid open to certain downsides of the well-known “inference to the best explanation” such as the commitment to consider only true propositions as possible explanations.