Work · Analytic Philosophy
Studies in the Logic of Explanation
Written with the chemist Paul Oppenheim, the paper sets out the deductive-nomological model: an explanation derives what is to be explained from laws and initial conditions.
Introduction
Hempel and the chemist Paul Oppenheim published the paper in Philosophy of Science in 1948. They treat a scientific explanation as an argument: the explanandum, the sentence describing what is to be explained, must follow logically from the explanans, which contains at least one general law and statements of particular conditions, and the explanans must be true and empirically testable. Explanation and prediction thus have the same logical structure. Hempel later added an inductive-statistical model for probabilistic laws. Counterexamples such as the flagpole, whose height can be derived from its shadow just as the shadow from the height, showed that the schema misses the asymmetry of causation; the model nevertheless remained the reference point of the debate on scientific explanation.
More works by Carl Gustav Hempel
Sources: Wikidata
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