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  1. Ein verbesserter deduktiv-nomologischer Erklärungsbegriff.Michael Küttner - 1976 - Zeitschrift Für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 7 (2):274-297.
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  • Conventionalism and the Impoverishment of the Space of Reasons: Carnap, Quine and Sellars.Kenneth R. Westphal - 2015 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (8).
    This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism (...)
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  • Towards a Research Agenda for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking.Mark Weinstein - 1990 - Informal Logic 12 (3).
    Towards a Research Agenda for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking.
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  • Towards an account of argumentation in science.Mark Weinstein - 1990 - Argumentation 4 (3):269-298.
    In this article it is argued that a complex model that includes Toulmin's functional account of argument, the pragma-dialectical stage analysis of argumentation offered by the Amsterdam School, and criteria developed in critical thinking theory, can be used to account for the normativity and field-dependence of argumentation in science. A pragma-dialectical interpretation of the four main elements of Toulmin's model, and a revised account of the double role of warrants, illuminates the domain specificity of scientific argumentation and the restrictions to (...)
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  • Deductive explanation of scientific laws.Raimo Tuomela - 1972 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 1 (3/4):369 - 392.
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  • The Quartercentenary Model of D–N Explanation.D. A. Thorpe - 1974 - Philosophy of Science 41 (2):188-195.
    This paper presents a new formal model for D–N explanation that gives intuitive criteria of acceptability, avoids the known trivializations, and links explanation with confirmation theory. Although set in the twenty-five year tradition of attempts to formalize D–N explanation, it proposes a new direction for the model that is to be distinguished from the syntactical and informational approaches by its introduction of restrictions which derive from the use which the D–N model can have in hypothesis testing. This model, illustrating the (...)
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  • Nickles on intensionality and the covering law model.Danny Steinberg - 1973 - Philosophy of Science 40 (3):403-407.
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  • In Search of Explanations: from Why-questions to Shakespearean Questions.Matti Sintonen - 1993 - Philosophica 51 (1):55-81.
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  • Scientific explanation: A critical survey.Gerhard Schurz - 1995 - Foundations of Science 1 (3):429-465.
    This paper describes the development of theories of scientific explanation since Hempel's earliest models in the 1940ies. It focuses on deductive and probabilistic whyexplanations and their main problems: lawlikeness, explanation-prediction asymmetries, causality, deductive and probabilistic relevance, maximal specifity and homogenity, the height of the probability value. For all of these topic the paper explains the most important approaches as well as their criticism, including the author's own accounts. Three main theses of this paper are: (1) Both deductive and probabilistic explanations (...)
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  • Outline of a theory of scientific understanding.Gerhard Schurz & Karel Lambert - 1994 - Synthese 101 (1):65-120.
    The basic theory of scientific understanding presented in Sections 1–2 exploits three main ideas.First, that to understand a phenomenonP (for a given agent) is to be able to fitP into the cognitive background corpusC (of the agent).Second, that to fitP intoC is to connectP with parts ofC (via arguments in a very broad sense) such that the unification ofC increases.Third, that the cognitive changes involved in unification can be treated as sequences of shifts of phenomena inC. How the theory fits (...)
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  • The Spirit of Logical Empiricism: Carl G. Hempel’s Role in Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science.Wesley C. Salmon - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):333-350.
    In this paper, I discuss the key role played by Carl G. Hempel's work on theoretical realism and scientific explanation in effecting a crucial philosophical transition between the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, the dominant view was that science is incapable of furnishing explanations of natural phenomena; at the end, explanation is widely viewed as an important, if not the primary, goal of science. In addition to its intellectual benefits, this transition (...)
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  • Models of explanation and explanation in medicine.Ren-Zong Qiu - 1989 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3 (2):199 – 212.
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  • L'explication en grammaire transformationnelle.Claude Panaccio - 1979 - Dialogue 18 (3):307-341.
    Malgré les critiques de toutes sortes dont elle fut et dont elle est encore l'objet, la grammaire transformationnelle est devenue en vingt ans, sous l'impulsion de Noam Chomsky, le paradigme dominant de la linguistique contemporaine. Et, bien sûr, l'incroyable rapidité de cette ascension s'est accompagnée de nombreuses crises de croissance. Linguistes, philosophes et psychologues, ainsi amenés à s'interroger sur les fondements épistémologiques de cette étrange discipline, se sont heurtés à de redoutables énigmes métathéoriques: de quel domaine factuel la linguistique est-elle (...)
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  • On the d-n model of scientific explanation.I. A. Omer - 1970 - Philosophy of Science 37 (3):417-433.
    This paper discusses the D-N model of scientific explanation. It is suggested that explanation is a part of assertive discourse where certain principles must be observed. Then use is made of the relation between the informative content and logical content of a sentence (as shown, for instance, by Popper) to draw some of the conditions necessary for a sound model. It is claimed that the conditions of the model proposed in the present paper exhaust the insights of the papers in (...)
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  • Tuomela on deductive explanation.Charles G. Morgan - 1976 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 5 (4):511 - 525.
    Almost every formal model of explanation thus far proposed has been demonstrated to be faulty. In this paper, a new model, proposed by Raimo Tuomela, is also demonstrated to be faulty. In particular, one condition of the model is shown to be too restrictive, and another condition of the model is shown to be too permissive.
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  • Omer on scientific explanation.Charles G. Morgan - 1973 - Philosophy of Science 40 (1):110-117.
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  • Kim on deductive explanation.Charles G. Morgan - 1970 - Philosophy of Science 37 (3):434-439.
    In [2] Hempel and Oppenheim give a definition of “explanation” for a certain formal language. In [1] Eberle, Kaplan, and Montague prove five theorems demonstrating that the Hempel and Oppenheim definition is not restrictive enough. In [3] Kim proposes two further conditions to supplement the Hempel and Oppenheim definition in order to avoid the objections posed in [1]. In this paper it is shown that the definition of Hempel and Oppenheim supplemented by Kim's conditions is open to a trivialization very (...)
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  • Enactivism Meets Mechanism: Tensions & Congruities in Cognitive Science.Jonny Lee - 2023 - Minds and Machines 33 (1):153-184.
    Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic model’s emphasis on localisable and decomposable mechanisms, often neural in nature, runs contrary to the enactivist ethos. Despite appearances, this paper argues that mechanistic explanations of cognition, being neither narrow nor reductive, and compatible with plausible iterations of ideas like (...)
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  • Explanatory unification.Philip Kitcher - 1981 - Philosophy of Science 48 (4):507-531.
    The official model of explanation proposed by the logical empiricists, the covering law model, is subject to familiar objections. The goal of the present paper is to explore an unofficial view of explanation which logical empiricists have sometimes suggested, the view of explanation as unification. I try to show that this view can be developed so as to provide insight into major episodes in the history of science, and that it can overcome some of the most serious difficulties besetting the (...)
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  • On the logical conditions of deductive explanation.Jaegwon Kim - 1963 - Philosophy of Science 30 (3):286-291.
    Hempel and Oppenheim have stated in Part III of their paper “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” [2] a set of conditions for deductive explanation. However, their analysis has come under damaging systematic criticisms in a recent paper by Eberle, Kaplan and Montague [1], The principal aim of the present paper is to review the Hempel-Oppenheim analysis and propose a strengthened version of it that avoids the recent criticisms.
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  • Explanation revisited.David Kaplan - 1961 - Philosophy of Science 28 (4):429-436.
    In 'Hempel and Oppenheim on Explanation', (see preceding article) Eberle, Kaplan, and Montague criticize the analysis of explanation offered by Hempel and Oppenheim in their 'Studies in the Logic of Explanation'. These criticisms are shown to be related to the fact that Hempel and Oppenheim's analysis fails to satisfy simultaneously three newly proposed criteria of adequacy for any analysis of explanation. A new analysis is proposed which satisfies these criteria and thus is immune to the criticisms brought against the earlier (...)
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  • Explanation, causality, and counterfactuals.Evan K. Jobe - 1985 - Philosophy of Science 52 (3):357-389.
    The aim of this paper is to develop an adequate version of the D-N theory of explanation for particular events and to show how the resulting D-N model can be used as a tool in articulating a regularity theory of causation and an analysis of the truth conditions for counterfactual conditionals. Starting with a basic model that is largely the product of other workers in this field, two new restrictions are formulated in order to construct a version of D-N explanation (...)
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  • Explanation, generality and understanding.C. A. Hooker - 1980 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (3):284 – 290.
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  • Relevance and redundancy in deductive explanations.Peter Gärdenfors - 1976 - Philosophy of Science 43 (3):420-431.
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  • The structure of physical explanation.John Forge - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (2):203-226.
    Some features of physical science relevant for a discussion of physical explanation are mentioned. The D-N account of physical explanation is discussed, and it is seen to restrict the scope of explanation in physical science because it imposes the requirement that the explanandum must be deducible from the explanans. Analysis shows that an alternative view of scientific explanation, called the instance view, allows a wider range of physical explanations. The view is seen to be free from a certain class of (...)
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  • Moor and Schlesinger on explanation.Brian Cupples - 1979 - Philosophy of Science 46 (4):645-650.
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  • Three types of explanation.Brian Cupples - 1977 - Philosophy of Science 44 (3):387-408.
    Several revisions of the Hempel and Oppenheim definition of explanation have been offered in recent years, and none have gone uncriticized in the literature. In the present paper it is argued that the difficulties involved with these attempts are based upon a confusion between three types of explanation, and that Professor David Kaplan's model of S-explanation provides a uniform treatment of all three types.
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  • Explanation in Physics: Explanation in Physical Theory.Peter Clark - 1990 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27:155-175.
    The corpus of physical theory is a paradigm of knowledge. The evolution of modern physical theory constitutes the clearest exemplar of the growth of knowledge. If the development of physical theory does not constitute an example of progress and growth in what we know about the Universe nothing does. So anyone interested in the theory of knowledge must be interested consequently in the evolution and content of physical theory. Crucial to the conception of physics as a paradigm of knowledge is (...)
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  • Towards an aristotelean theory of scientific explanation.B. A. Brody - 1972 - Philosophy of Science 39 (1):20-31.
    In this paper, I consider a variety of objections against the covering-law model of scientific explanation, show that Aristotle was already aware of them and had solutions for them, and argue that these solutions are correct. These solutions involve the notions of nonHumean causality and of essential properties. There are a great many familiar objections, both methodological and epistemological, to introducing these concepts into the methodology of science, but I show that these objections are based upon misunderstandings of these concepts.
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  • A pragmatic analysis of idealizations in physics.William F. Barr - 1974 - Philosophy of Science 41 (1):48-64.
    A brief discussion is offered of what it means to say that a set of statements provides D-N explanation with special emphasis given to approximative D-N explanation. An idealized theory is seen to provide approximative D-N explanation. An ideal case provides explanation only if postulates are offered which connect the ideal antecedent condition with actual conditions. Such postulates will help in accounting for deviations between what the consequent of the ideal case entails and what actually occurs. Three ways are presented (...)
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  • Deductive scientific explanation.Robert Ackermann - 1965 - Philosophy of Science 32 (2):155-167.
    In this paper, I shall examine attempts to furnish formal models for deductive scientific explanation. All such attempts have had certain defects. The most serious of these defects is to be found in the fact that the extant models seem to be formally restrictive in ways that do not allow any obvious generalization of their conditions which will encompass the full range of all those scientific explanations which must be considered plausible candidates for translation into deductive models.
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  • Explanation, Causation and Deduction.Fred Wilson - 1985 - Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Reidel.
    The purpose of this essay is to defend the deductive-nomological model of explanation against a number of criticisms that have been made of it. It has traditionally been thought that scientific explanations were causal and that scientific explanations involved deduction from laws. In recent years, however, this three-fold identity has been challenged: there are, it is argued, causal explanations that are not scientific, scientific explanations that are not deductive, deductions from laws that are neither causal explanations nor scientific explanations, and (...)
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  • Causal V. Positivist Theories of Scientific Explanation: A Defense of the Causal Theory.Douglas Hans Rice - 1996 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
    Three fundamental claims are defended in this dissertation. First, the influence of Hume's epistemological program and his skepticism with respect to causal knowledge have hindered the development of an adequate theory of scientific explanation. Second, Hume's conception of causal knowledge is outdated, and knowledge of causation should be relieved of the special epistemological burden placed on it by Hume's followers. Finally, once relieved of this Humean epistemological burden, the causal theory of scientific explanation is superior to alternatives lying in the (...)
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