Explanations, laws, and theories

The work of Carl Hempel

During the 1930s and ’40s, philosophers fought back against this dismissal of explanation. Popper, Hempel, and Ernest Nagel (1901–85) all proposed an ideal of objective explanation and argued that explanation should be restored as one of the aims of the sciences. Their writings recapitulated in more precise form a view that had surfaced in earlier reflections on science from Aristotle onward. Hempel’s formulations were the most detailed and systematic and the most influential.

Hempel explicitly conceded that many scientific advances fail to make one feel at home with the phenomena—and, indeed, that they sometimes replace a familiar world with something much stranger. He denied, however, that providing an explanation should yield any sense of “at homeness.” First, explanations should give grounds for expecting the phenomenon to be explained, so that one no longer wonders why it came about but sees that it should have been anticipated; second, explanations should do this by making apparent how the phenomenon exemplifies the laws of nature. So, according to Hempel, explanations are arguments. The conclusion of the argument is a statement describing the phenomenon to be explained. The premises must include at least one law of nature and must provide support for the conclusion.

The simplest type of explanation is that in which the conclusion describes a fact or event and the premises provide deductive grounds for it. Hempel’s celebrated example involved the cracking of a car radiator on a cold night. Here the conclusion to be explained might be formulated as the statement, “The radiator cracked on the night of January 10th.” Among the premises would be statements describing the conditions (“The temperature on the night of January 10th fell to −10 °C,” etc.), as well as laws about the freezing of water, the pressure exerted by ice, and so forth. The premises would consitute an explanation because the conclusion follows from them deductively.

Hempel allowed for other forms of explanation—cases in which one deduces a law of nature from more general laws, as well as cases in which statistical laws are invoked to assign a high probability to the conclusion. Conforming to his main proposal that explanation consists in using the laws of nature to demonstrate that the phenomenon to be explained was to be expected, he insisted that every genuine explanation must appeal to some law (completely general or statistical) and that the premises must support the conclusion (either deductively or by conferring high probability). His models of explanation were widely accepted among philosophers for about 20 years, and they were welcomed by many investigators in the social sciences. During subsequent decades, however, they encountered severe criticism.

Difficulties

One obvious line of objection is that explanations, in ordinary life as well as in the sciences, rarely take the form of complete arguments. A clumsy person, for example, may explain why there is a stain on the carpet by confessing that he spilled the coffee, and a geneticist may account for an unusual fruit fly by claiming that there was a recombination of the parental genotypes. Hempel responded to this criticism by distinguishing between what is actually presented to someone who requests an explanation (the “explanation sketch”) and the full objective explanation. A reply to an explanation seeker works because the explanation sketch can be combined with information that the person already possesses to enable him to arrive at the full explanation. The explanation sketch gains its explanatory force from the full explanation and contains the part of the full explanation that the questioner needs to know.

A second difficulty for Hempel’s account resulted from his candid admission that he was unable to offer a full analysis of the notion of a scientific law. Laws are generalizations about a range of natural phenomena, sometimes universal (“Any two bodies attract one another with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them”) and sometimes statistical (“The chance that any particular allele will be transmitted to a gamete in meiosis is 50 percent”). Not every generalization, however, counts as a scientific law. There are streets on which every house is made of brick, but no judgment of the form “All houses on X street are made of brick” qualifies as a scientific law. As Reichenbach pointed out, there are accidental generalizations that seem to have very broad scope. Whereas the statement “All uranium spheres have a radius of less than one kilometre” is a matter of natural law (large uranium spheres would be unstable because of fundamental physical properties), the statement “All gold spheres have a radius of less than one kilometre” merely expresses a cosmic accident.

Intuitively, laws of nature seem to embody a kind of necessity: they do not simply describe the way that things happen to be, but, in some sense, they describe how things have to be. If one attempted to build a very large uranium sphere, one would be bound to fail. The prevalent attitude of logical empiricism, following the celebrated discussion of “necessary connections” in nature by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), was to be wary of invoking notions of necessity. To be sure, logical empiricists recognized the necessity of logic and mathematics, but the laws of nature could hardly be conceived as necessary in this sense, for it is logically (and mathematically) possible that the universe had different laws. Indeed, one main hope of Hempel and his colleagues was to avoid difficulties with necessity by relying on the concepts of law and explanation. To say that there is a necessary connection between two types of events is, they proposed, simply to assert a lawlike succession—events of the first type are regularly succeeded by events of the second, and the succession is a matter of natural law. For this program to succeed, however, logical empiricism required an analysis of the notion of a law of nature that did not rely on the concept of necessity. Logical empiricists were admirably clear about what they wanted and about what had to be done to achieve it, but the project of providing the pertinent analysis of laws of nature remained an open problem for them.

Scruples about necessary connections also generated a third class of difficulties for Hempel’s project. There are examples of arguments that fit the patterns approved by Hempel and yet fail to count as explanatory, at least by ordinary lights. Imagine a flagpole that casts a shadow on the ground. One can explain the length of the shadow by deducing it (using trigonometry) from the height of the pole, the angle of elevation of the Sun, and the law of light propagation (i.e., the law that light travels in straight lines). So far this is unproblematic, for the little argument just outlined accords with Hempel’s model of explanation. Notice, however, that there is a simple way to switch one of the premises with the conclusion: if one starts with the length of the shadow, the angle of elevation of the Sun, and the law of light propagation, one can deduce (using trigonometry) the height of the pole. The new derivation also accords with Hempel’s model. But this is perturbing, because, while one thinks of the height of a pole as explaining the length of a shadow, one does not think of the length of a shadow as explaining the height of a pole. Intuitively, the amended derivation gets things backward, reversing the proper order of dependence. Given the commitments of logical empiricism, however, these diagnoses make no sense, and the two arguments are on a par with respect to explanatory power.

Although Hempel was sometimes inclined to “bite the bullet” and defend the explanatory worth of both arguments, most philosophers concluded that something was lacking. Furthermore, it seemed obvious what the missing ingredient was: shadows are causally dependent on poles in a way in which poles are not causally dependent on shadows. Since explanation must respect dependencies, the amended derivation is explanatorily worthless. Like the concept of natural necessity, however, the notion of causal dependence was anathema to logical empiricists—both had been targets of Hume’s famous critique. To develop a satisfactory account of explanatory asymmetry, therefore, the logical empiricists needed to capture the idea of causal dependence by formulating conditions on genuine explanation in an acceptable idiom. Here too Hempel’s program proved unsuccessful.

The fourth and last area in which trouble surfaced was in the treatment of probabilistic explanation. As discussed in the preceding section (Discovery, justification, and falsification), the probability ascribed to an outcome may vary, even quite dramatically, when new information is added. Hempel appreciated the point, recognizing that some statistical arguments that satisfy his conditions on explanation have the property that, even though all the premises are true, the support they lend to the conclusion would be radically undermined by adding extra premises. He attempted to solve the problem by adding further requirements. It was shown, however, that the new conditions were either ineffective or else trivialized the activity of probabilistic explanation.

Nor is it obvious that the fundamental idea of explaining through making the phenomena expectable can be sustained. To cite a famous example, one can explain the fact that the mayor contracted paresis by pointing out that he had previously had untreated syphilis, even though only 8 to 10 percent of people with untreated syphilis go on to develop paresis. In this instance, there is no statistical argument that confers high probability on the conclusion that the mayor contracted paresis—that conclusion remains improbable in light of the information advanced (85 percent of those with untreated syphilis do not get paresis). What seems crucial is the increase in probability, the fact that the probability of the conclusion rose from truly minute (paresis is extremely rare in the general population) to significant.