Scientific Explanation
In addition to providing predictions about future events, society often takes scientific theories to offer explanations for those that occur regularly or have already occurred. Philosophers have investigated the criteria by which a scientific theory can be said to have successfully explained a phenomenon, as well as what gives a scientific theory explanatory power. One early and influential theory of scientific explanation was put forward by Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim in 1948. Their Deductive-Nomological (D-N) model of explanation says that a scientific explanation succeeds by subsuming a phenomenon under a general law. An explanation, then, is a valid deductive argument. For empiricists like Hempel and other logical positivists, this provided a way of understanding explanation without appeal to causation. Although ignored for a decade, this view was subjected to substantial criticism, resulting in several widely believed counter examples to the theory.
In addition to their D-N model, Hempel and Oppenheim offered other statistical models of explanation which would account for statistical sciences. These theories have received criticism as well. Salmon attempted to provide an alternative account for some of the problems with Hempel and Oppenheim's model by developing his statistical relevance model. In addition to Salmon's model, others have suggested that explanation is primarily motivated by unifying disparate phenomena or primarily motivated by providing the causal or mechanical histories leading up to the phenomenon (or phenomena of that type).
Read more about this topic: Philosophers Of Science
Famous quotes containing the words scientific and/or explanation:
“As soon as I suspect a fine effect is being achieved by accident I lose interest. I am not interested ... in unskilled labor.... The scientific actor is an even worker. Any one may achieve on some rare occasion an outburst of genuine feeling, a gesture of imperishable beauty, a ringing accent of truth; but your scientific actor knows how he did it. He can repeat it again and again and again. He can be depended on.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (18651932)
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no minds eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)