Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Although the subject of explanation has been a major concern of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle, modern philosophical discussion of this topic, at least as it pertains to science, begins with the so-called deductive-nomological (DN) model of explanation in the middle of the twentieth century. This model has many advocates but unquestionably the most detailed and influential statement is due to Carl Hempel (1965).The basic idea of the DN model is that explanations have the structure of sound deductive arguments in which a law of nature occurs as an essential premise. One deduces the explanandum, which describes the phenomenon to be explained, from an explanans, consisting of one or more laws, typically supplemented by true sentences about initial conditions. The model is intended to apply both to the explanation of “general regularities” by other laws and the explanation of particular events, although subsequent developments have largely focused on the latter. The derivation of facts about planetary trajectories (e.g. Kepler's laws) from the laws of Newtonian mechanics, the gravitational inverse square law and appropriate information about initial conditions is a paradigmatic illustration of the pattern of explanation that the DN model attempts to capture.The DN model is meant to capture explanation via deduction from deterministic laws and this raises the obvious question of ... log in or subscribe to read full text