Hempel and Oppenheim, in their paper 'The Logic of Explanation', have offered an analysis of the notion of scientific explanation. The present paper advances considerations in the light of which their analysis seems inadequate. In particular, several theorems are proved with roughly the following content: between almost any theory and almost any singular sentence, certain relations of explainability hold.

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 (...) the literature, solve the difficulties encountered by other authors, but have some damaging consequences on the D-N model of scientific explanation. (shrink)

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.

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 (...) analysis. (shrink)

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.

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 (...) analogous to that given in [1]. (shrink)