Document Type
Other
Publication Date
2014
College/Unit
WVU Libraries
Abstract
In the mid-twentieth century, Hempel (1962, 1965) bucked posit ivist ort hodoxy and proposed that explanations have a legitimate role to play in science. Yet, when it came time to offer up a model of explanation, Hempel held fast to the positivist tendency of abstracting both from facts about human psychology and from the specific contents of claims (i.e., in favor of bare logical form). At the broadest level, he proposed that explanations are sets of true statements arranged into formally acceptable arguments. That such arguments count as explanations has, Hempel thought, nothing to do with what anyone thinks or feels; explanations are dissociable, even doubly so, from psychology.
Digital Commons Citation
Waskan, Jonathan; Harmon, Ian; Higgins, Andrew; and Spino, Joseph, "Investigating the Lay and Scientific Norms for Using ‘Explanation’" (2014). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 1138.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/1138
Source Citation
Waskan J., Harmon I., Higgins A., Spino J. (2014) Investigating the Lay and Scientific Norms for Using “Explanation”. In: Lissack M., Graber A. (eds) Modes of Explanation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Comments
This is an author's manuscript. The publisher's version of the article is available at https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403865_16.