Wesley Salmon often mentioned, or implicitly referred to, the “overcoming psychological uneasiness” conception of scientific explanation (e.g., 1984: 12-13). Do any readers know whether anyone has actually ever held the view Salmon characterizes? Did Salmon ever attribute it to anyone or otherwise cite anyone as having been sympathetic to it? Perhaps some are wont to point to a few parallels with Friedman’s (1974) classic paper, though that comparison is murky at best. And invocation of processing fluency among psychologists working on metacognition abounds, but I’m not aware of any literature that applies this research to philosophical accounts of explanation, self-explanation, etc.
Got Salmon?
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I don’t know who Salmon had in mind and I don’t have the book with me now so I can’t look for clues. He might simply have in mind some old literature on explanation – meaning, people whose names we might not even recognize anymore.