Scientific Explanation

The three cardinal aims of science are prediction, control, and explanation; but the greatest of these is explanation. Also the most inscrutable: prediction aims at truth, and control at happiness, and insofar as we have some independent grasp of these notions, we can evaluate science’s strategies of prediction and control from the outside. Explanation, by contrast, aims at scientific understanding, a good intrinsic to science and therefore something that it seems we can only look to science itself to explicate. Philosophers have wondered whether science might be better off abandoning the pursuit of explanation. Duhem (1954), among others, argued that explanatory knowledge would have to be a kind of knowledge so exalted as to be forever beyond the reach of ordinary scientific inquiry: it would have to be knowledge of the essential natures of things, something that neo-Kantians, empiricists, and practical men of science could all agree was neither possible nor perhaps even desirable. Everything changed when Hempel formulated his dn account of explanation. In accordance with the observation above, that our only clue to the nature of explanatory knowledge is science’s own explanatory practice, Hempel proposed simply to describe what kind of things scientists tendered when they claimed to have an explanation, without asking whether such things were capable of providing “true understanding”. Since Hempel, the philosophy of scientific explanation has proceeded in this humble vein,