Abstract
As mentioned in Chapter 1, both Popper and the Empiricists advocate the use of the Deductive Model as a model of the explanation of particular occurrences. But the Empiricists go one step further and suggest its employment as a model of the explanation of laws by higher level theories. For example, Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel have said: “Scientific explanation consists in subsuming under some rule or law which expresses an invariant character of a group of events, the particular event it is said to explain. Laws themselves may be explained, and in the same manner, by showing that they are consequences of more comprehensive theories.”1
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References
Cohen & Nagel (1934), p. 397. But cf. Campbell (1921), p. 80: “To say that all gases expand when heated is not to explain why hydrogen expands when heated; it merely leads us to ask immediately why all gases expand. An explanation which leads immediately to another question of the same kind is no explanation at all.”
In his concentration on the work of Carnap, Lakatos misses this Empiricist conception of the growth of knowledge. See Lakatos (1968), p. 326.
Hempel (1962), pp. 100–101; see also Hempel (1965), pp. 343 ff. Though Hempel intends here to be providing examples of how the Deductive Model can be applied to the case of theories explaining laws, in a footnote he goes on to concede that: “strictly speaking, the theory [Newton’s] contradicts Galileo’s law, but shows the latter to hold true in very close approximation within a certain range of application. A similar relation obtains between the principles of wave optics and those of geometrical optics.” (1962). p. 101 n. In regard to this point see the concluding paragraph of the present chapter.
Thus we see that it is the existence of theoretical terms which is the problem; the distinction between observational and theoretical terms was not made in order to solve the problem, as has been suggested e.g. in Putnam (1962) and Achinstein (1965).
Cf. Carnap (1966 a), p. 232: “The statement that empirical laws are derived from theoretical laws is an oversimplification. It is not possible to derive them directly because a theoretical law contains theoretical terms, whereas an empirical law contains only observable terms. This prevents any direct deduction of an empirical law from a theoretical one.”
Cf. Ramsey (1931). We note however that Ramsey does not himself suggest the procedure given here as a means of eliminating theoretical terms, but as “[t]he best way to write our theory” (p. 231)—i.e. as the best way to make more salient those aspects of his example which he considers important.
Hempel (1965), p. 216.
See e.g. Feyerabend (1963), pp. 16ff.
Duhem (1906), p. 193.
Popper (1949), pp. 357–359, and (1957), pp. 197ff.
See e.g. Feyerabend (1963), pp. 20ff.
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Dilworth, G. (1986). Chapter 4 The Logical Empiricist Conception of Scientific Progress. In: Scientific Progress. Synthese Library, vol 153. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2966-6_5
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