Hempel's proposal of covering laws which explain historical events has a certain plausibility, but can never be actually realized due to the chaotic nature of history. The natural laws that would govern both individual lives and greater history would be nonlinear; consequently, in the terminology of chaos theory, the final states of both are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Initial conditions would need to be exactly known in order to account correctly for historic phenomena, especially for causes and effects which (...) span long, historically interesting, lengths of time. Covering-law history therefore fails because the details of initial conditions are generally unknowable. Since this constraint diminishes as the time over which covering laws operate is divided into smaller consecutive intervals of scenes, covering-law explanations resolve into those having a narrative temporal structure. (shrink)

The classic logical positivist account of historical explanation, putting forward what is variously called the "regularity interpretation" (#Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation), the "covering law model" (#Dray, Laws and Explanation in History), or the "deductive model" (Michael #Scriven, "Truisms as Grounds for Historical Explanations"). See also #Danto, Narration and Knowledge, for further criticisms of the model. Hempel formalizes historical explanation as involving (a) statements of determining (initial and boundary) conditions for the event to be explained, and (b) statements of (...) general laws that imply that whenever events of the kind described in (a) occur, an event of the kind to be explained will take place. He admits that in practice historians rarely explain historical events in this way, but instead give only fragmentary "explanation sketches." Such sketches can, however, be "scientifically acceptable," providing it points to where "more specific statements" are to be found (351). An interesting aspect of the article is its "late" positivist, proto‑Kuhnian assertion that "the separation of 'pure description' and 'hypothetical generalization and theory construction' in empirical science is unwarranted" (356). But Hempel does not work out the wider implications of this important conclusion. It is also worth noting that he himself was not much interested in the philosophy of history; other authors took up his model and discussed it within that context. Usefully discussed by #Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:112‑17. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, founded and edited by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris in 1937. Topics treated include the ideal of unified science within the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle of philosophers, the birth of the Unity of Science Movement, the publication of the Encyclopedia by the University of Chicago Press, and the slow demise of the project during and after the 1940's. Neurath's, Carnap's, and Morris's conceptions of unified science and philosophy (...) are examined individually and used to analyze aspects of their collaboration including disagreements over financial management, over topics and authors, and over the nature and role of semantics in philosophy and science. The dispute between Neurath and Carnap about Neurath's monograph "Foundations of the Social Sciences" is examined in detail. These disputes among the editors, and between the editors and some encyclopedists, are used to explain the failure of the Encyclopedia and, less directly, the demise of logical empiricism in the 1950's and 1960's. The ideals and goals driving the Encyclopedia are briefly compared with recent arguments for the disunity of science. (shrink)