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#5561·Jad Elmourad, about 8 hours agoI don't think it follows that a competing explanation would also have uncountably many working variants just because it involves continuous quantities.
The grass example is easy to vary precisely because there's no explanation for why the amount should be 1kg rather than 0.9kg, 0.95kg, etc. If 1kg doesn't work, I can just keep changing the number. Nothing in the explanatory argument constrains it.
But suppose grass really did cure the disease and we actually understood how. Maybe a particular compound in the grass interacts with some biological mechanism, and a certain concentration is required for the effect. The explanation might allow a whole range of effective dosages rather than one exact number, but that range would itself be explained and constrained by the mechanism.
I wouldn't consider every possible dosage within that range a different variation of the explanation. They're different cases covered by the same explanation. Saying “this mechanism works within this dosage range” is one explanatory claim, even if there are infinitely many numerical values inside the range.
So I think there's a difference between an explanation containing a continuous variable and an explanation whose parameters can be changed arbitrarily without explanatory reason. The first can be perfectly constrained by the explanatory structure. The second is exactly what I understand easy-to-vary to mean.
This also comes back to the point I made in #5553: the program relies on the user's understanding of the explanatory argument. A knowledgeable user wouldn't enter 0.9kg, 0.9001kg, 0.90001kg, etc. as infinitely many distinct explanatory variations if they understand them as instances of one explained dosage range.
But suppose grass really did cure the disease and we actually understood how. Maybe a particular compound in the grass interacts with some biological mechanism, and a certain concentration is required for the effect. The explanation might allow a whole range of effective dosages rather than one exact number, but that range would itself be explained and constrained by the mechanism.
That assumes the cure works: then I agree there’s a reason for the specific range, and that range will be part of the one working variant. Your program would then accurately prefer it over a rival.
But the program also needs to account for cases where the cure doesn’t work. Then we can’t refer to a range anymore because there’s no reason to constrain the explanation to that range. And then we’re left with the situation described in #5549.