Carl Gustav Hempel

Dzieła

• 1945Studies in the Logic of Confirmation (Studia nad logiką potwierdzania)

  Jeśli każdy czarny kruk potwierdza „wszystkie kruki są czarne”, to potwierdza je również każda nieczarna rzecz, która nie jest krukiem – biały but, jak ujmują to późniejsze opowieści: paradoks potwierdzania.

• 1948Studies in the Logic of Explanation (Studia nad logiką wyjaśniania)

  Napisany z chemikiem Paulem Oppenheimem artykuł przedstawia model dedukcyjno-nomologiczny: wyjaśnienie wyprowadza to, co ma być wyjaśnione, z praw i warunków początkowych.

Stanowisko

Hempel gave logical empiricism its classical accounts of confirmation and explanation, and was at the same time one of its sharpest internal critics. “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” (1945) showed a paradox: if every black raven confirms “all ravens are black”, and this law is logically equivalent to “everything non-black is a non-raven”, then a white shoe confirms it too. With Oppenheim he set out the deductive-nomological model in 1948: an explanation is an argument whose premises contain at least one general law and particular conditions, and whose conclusion describes what is to be explained. He had already applied the model to history in 1942, and later added inductive-statistical explanations for probabilistic laws. Explanation and prediction have the same logical form. In “Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning” (1950) he showed that every proposed formulation of the verifiability criterion, including Ayer’s, either excludes scientific laws or lets in metaphysics, and concluded that cognitive significance comes in degrees. In his late papers he engaged closely with Kuhn, his colleague at Princeton, and moved towards a more pragmatic view of scientific rationality.

Życie i kontekst

Carl Gustav Hempel was born in Oranienburg near Berlin in 1905. He studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin, spent 1929–30 in Vienna, where he met Carnap, Schlick and Waismann, and belonged to Hans Reichenbach’s Berlin Group. His doctorate on probability (1934) was completed after Reichenbach had been dismissed. Because his wife was of Jewish descent he left Germany for Belgium, where he worked with Paul Oppenheim, and in 1937 went to Chicago as Carnap’s assistant. He taught at City College in New York, at Yale (1948–1955), at Princeton (1955–1973), where Robert Nozick was among his doctoral students, and finally at Pittsburgh. He died near Princeton in 1997.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Function of General Laws in History (1942)
• Studies in the Logic of Explanation (with Paul Oppenheim, 1948)
• Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning (1950)
• Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965)
• Philosophy of Natural Science (1966)