Carl Hempel Explanation

In the essay “Studies In the Logic of Explanation”, Carl Hempel attempts to break down scientific explanation into its fundamental components in pursuit of defining what it means to explain a phenomenon scientifically. In doing so, he proposes a set of rigorous criteria that he believes constitute a true explanation. He starts by separating an explanation “into two major constituents, the explanandum and the explanans” (136). The explanandum is the phenomenon that is to be explained, while the explanans represent a series of statements which “account for the phenomenon” (137). According to Hempel, the explanans can be further subdivided into particular antecedent conditions and certain general laws which can be combined in such a way to

However, by making the assumption that all statements are universally either “true” or “false”, he dismisses perfectly logical scientific explanations which are merely outdated. Specifically, he is saying that explanations that were previously accepted by the scientific community but are no longer due to “ampler evidence now available...was not-and had never been-a correct explanation” (138). This is simply not true, as the “correctness” of an explanation is not binary; that is, there may exist some explanations which provide partial explanations which may be perfectly accurate in some contexts, but misleading or even wrong in others. I will refer to this as the context dependency of scientific laws. A good example of such a phenomenon with more than one correct explanation is how electricity is produced. Electricity can be explained as the motion of electrons, which are subatomic particles that circulate around the nucleus of an atom. The Bohr model gives this explanation, claiming that an atom looks akin to our solar system. Recently, more accurate models like the Schroedinger model have come through to state that the Bohr model is not entirely accurate, and that the existence of electrons around atoms in certain places is based on probabilistic models. Despite this new information, the Bohr model can still be used to explain electricity and the motion of

Isaac Newton and Aristotle both conjectured how motion of bodies work by offering their own explanations. Aristotle wanted to answer the question of why a ball tossed into the air will seemingly always stop at some point, so he conjectured that it is a natural tendency (i.e. a general law) for all objects to want to come to rest (Smoot). As Newton comes along, he suggests that objects will always travel in a straight line at a constant velocity, and that the existence of friction (or some other outside force) is what causes objects to stop at some point. While these statements may seem contradictory, as the Bohr Model and more recent models may also seem contradictory, it is natural to assume that at least one of these statements must be false. However, making such a claim again ignores the physical context in which the phenomenon resides. Aristotle’s conjecture is true, as long as the ball is always thrown on Earth where there is an atmosphere. Therefore, it can be seen that the truth of a general law is dependent on what one means by the word always. Newton’s laws may be more true on a broader level, but even they fail when an object is moving near the speed of light. Hence, Newtonian mechanics is only true if one assumes that the