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The Epic Interactive Encyclopedia 1998
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Epic Interactive Encyclopedia, The - 1998 Edition (1998)(Epic Marketing).iso
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Explanation
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INFOTEXT
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1992-09-02
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In science, an attempt to make clear the
cause of any natural event, by reference to
physical laws and to observations. The extent
to which any explanation can be said to be
true is one of the chief concerns of
philosophy, partly because observations may
be wrongly interpreted, partly because
explanations should help us predict how
nature will behave. Although it may be
reasonable to expect that a physical law will
hold in the future, that expectation is
problematic in that it relies on induction, a
much-criticized feature of human thought; in
fact no explanation, however `scientific',
can be held to be true for all time, and thus
the difference between a scientific and a
common-sense explanation remains the subject
of intense philosophical debate.