Great Ideas of Philosophy

D. Hempel’s theory is called the deductive nomological (derived from the Greek word for “law,” nomos)model of explanation. He contrasts this with explanations based on inferences from past occurrences,referring to this mode of explanation as inductive statistical, or what might be called the inductivenomological model.III. The question arises, then, as to the status of those disciplines that lack universal laws and, thus, cannot explainevents by deducing them from such laws.A. This is where the inductive statistical model comes in.1. Hempel acknowledged that the most stringent criterion for full-fledged scientific explanations wasmissing from many disciplines understood on commonsense grounds to be scientific.2. These disciplines get their scientific “status” via their discovery of reliable relationships permittingaccurate prediction.B. For all its neatness and intuitive appeal, the Hempelian scheme is plagued with problems.1. To some extent, the “statistical” nature of reality itself raises questions as to the adequacy of a modelof scientific explanation calling for absolute and universal laws allowing perfect predictions.2. Also, the logical structure of Hempelian explanation leaves room for nonsensical examplesnonetheless qualifying as scientific explanations.3. A further difficulty with the model is that it seems to permit spurious causal inferences.C. The attempt to extend this model of explanation to the realm of social phenomena produces yet anotherwave of compelling criticism.1. Historical events are nonrecurring. Accordingly, what a “general law” would cover in the realm ofhistory isn’t clear.2. The character and intelligibility of a historical event derive from the specific persons, motives, andcontexts involved.3. What is true in history would be the same wherever actual persons, with their individuated needs,judgments, and aspirations, constitute the events to be explained.IV. It would strain credulity to believe that the lawful and time-ordered sequences in the natural world come aboutwithout the participation of occult forces, hidden powers, and the like.A. Gravitation, for instance, refers to a physical reality that causes objects to behave in predictable waystoward each other.1. The behavior is not simply reliable but seemingly necessitated.2. We find in the laws of science the real structure of reality, the truth behind the merely clutteredpictures of everyday life.B. Realists regard the laws of science as reflecting reality as it really is. The anti-realist perspective takes suchlaws to be useful generalizations and valid within the contexts in which they were developed butinsufficient to account for all that “really is the case.”1. Princeton’s Bastian van Fraassen, a defender of the anti-realist school, argues that what counts as agood explanation is not the logical structure of the argument but the extent to which it answers a“why” question arising in a given context.2. In her book How the Laws of Physics Lie, Nancy Cartwright suggested that the idealized world inwhich the laws are unfailing is a world occupied by no one in the real world, physicists included.Reality is disorderly, contextually fluctuating, resistant to any set of simple and simplifying laws.C. The realist invokes the concept of inference to the best explanation as a defense of realism.1. NASA’s space program was based on the assumption that the laws of classical physics and theaccuracy of available instruments provide an account of reality.2. Based on this assumption, rockets were built, astronomical calculations were performed, a date waschosen, and a launch took place.3. Astronauts reached the moon, then returned safely to earth.4. The “best explanation” of the result is that the laws accepted and implemented capture the fabric ofreality as such.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 11