philosophy of science a very short introduction jul 2002

[...]... explanandum, and the general laws and particular facts that do the explaining are called the explanans The explanandum itself may be either a particular fact or a general law In the example above, it was a particular fact - the death of my plant But sometimes the things we Hempel was aware that not all scientific explanations fit his model exactly For example, if you ask someone why Athens is always... planetary orbits i ! are elliptical We saw that this explanation fits the covering law g model- for Newton deduced the shape of the planetary orbits from 5' his law of gravity, plus some additional facts But Newton's explanation was also a causal one, since elliptical planetary orbits are caused by the gravitational attraction between planets and the sun I ''t However, the covering law and causal accounts... exerting an additional gravitational force on Uranus Adams and Leverrier were able to calculate the mass and position that this planet would have to have, if its gravitational pull was indeed responsible for Uranus' strange behaviour Shortly afterwards the planet Neptune was discovered, almost exactly where Adams and Leverrier had predicted Now clearly we should not criticize Adams' and Leverrier's behaviour... issues are no longer relevant Rather, it is a consequence of the increasingly specialized nature of science, and of the polarization between the sciences and the humanities that characterizes the modern education system You may still be wondering exactly what philosophy of science is all about For to say that it 'studies the methods of science' , as we did above, is not really to say very much Rather than... remains to be discovered about the neurological basis of autism Obviously we cannot guarantee that the explanation will eventually be found But given the number of explanatory successes that modern science has already notched up, the smart money must be on many of today's unexplained facts eventually being explained too ~ I ''t Can science explain everything? Modern science can explain a great deal about... is aiming to produce a false description of the world But that is not what anti-realists think Rather, anti-realists hold that the aim of science is to provide a true description of a certain part of the world - the 'observable' part As far as the 'unobservable' part of the world goes, it makes no odds whether what science says is true or not, according to anti-realists There is a very ancient debate... of causality-based accounts The details vary, but the basic idea behind these accounts is that to explain a phenomenon is simply to say what caused it In some cases, the difference between the covering law and causal accounts is not actually very great, for to deduce the occurrence of a phenomenon from a general law often just is to give its cause For 5' example, recall again Newton's explanation of. .. the nature of rationality, the appropriate degree of confidence to place in science, 38 39 Hempel's account is known as the covering law model of explanation, for reasons that will become clear Chapter 3 Explanation in science One ofthe most important aims of science is to try and explain what happens in the world around us Sometimes we seek explanations for practical ends For example, we might want... Hempel allowed that a scientific explanation could appeal to particular facts as well as general laws, but he held that at least one general law was always essential So to explain a phenomenon, on Hempel's conception, is to show that its occurrence follows deductively from a general law, perhaps supplemented by other laws and/or particular facts, all of which must be true ~ ~ _ 1Il '0 l' § - f want to... the last chapter, was a leading empiricist, and he argued that it is impossible to experience causal relations So he concluded that they don't exist - causality is a figment of our imagination! This is a very hard conclusion to accept Surely it is an objective fact that dropping glass vases causes them to break? Hume denied this He allowed that it is an objective fact that most glass vases that have . David DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCH ITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne ARI STOTLE Jonathan Barnes ART H ISTORY Dana Arnold ART TH EORY Cynthia Freeland THE HISTORYOF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin ATH EISM. FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle FREU D Anthony Storr GAll LEO Stillman Drake GAN DH I Bhikhu Parekh Very Short Introductions available now: ANCI ENT PH ILOSOPHY Julia Annas THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ANIMAL RIGHTS. for a mere list of the activities that are usually called &apos ;science& apos;. Rather, we are asking what common feature all the things on that list share, i.e. what it is that makes something a