ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some brief, overarching thoughts about explanatory coherentism. This philosophical framework might be a good fit for the design of comprehensive etiological explanations. It is an attempt to connect Hill's viewpoints with concepts from Ted Poston's book, Reason and Explanation: A Defense of Explanatory Coherentism. A particularly intriguing way to use Hill's heuristics as explanatory virtues would be to integrate it with a computational coherence assessment system. For example, Paul Thagard has developed computational models of coherence and integrated them with aspects of scientific communication into a consensus model of scientific discourse. The coherence theory of truth “states that the truth of any (true) proposition consists in its coherence with some specified set of propositions”. The Hill-Poston approach to etiological explanation has some striking similarities with explanatory unification, spearheaded by Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher. In epidemiology, two classic frameworks for causal inference and analysis are Hill's heuristics and Rothman's sufficient-component cause model, respectively.
