The Unificationist Account of Friedman and Kitcher

The Unificationist accounts of Friedman[Friedman] and Kitcher[Kitcher] emphasize the importance of explanations that generalize to a broad range of phenomena. They do this by expressing explanations as parameterized argument patterns into which the specifics of a given situation can be substituted. To the extent that general patterns can be applied to explain specific situations, the better the explanations are.