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Explanations and their Justifications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Rudolph H. Weingartner
Rudolph H. Weingartner*
Affiliation:
San Francisco State College
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Extract

Criticism of the deductive model of explanation continues. In a recent article, “Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanations,” Professor Michael Scriven hangs a great many critical points from the distinction between explanations and their justifications. I should like to examine his proposal with a view to showing that in so far as this distinction can be made, it cannot be used as a basis of criticisms of the deductive or covering law model, as it was originally outlined by Professor Carl G. Hempel.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 1961 , pp. 300 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1961

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References

1 I owe much to discussions of this theme with my colleague, Professor Sidney Zink, particularly the idea that only acts are justified.

2 In Patrick Gardiner (ed.), Theories of History (Glencoe: Free Press), 1959, pp. 443-75.

3 “The function of General Laws in History,” Journal of Philosophy, 1942; reprinted in H. Feigl and W. Sellars (eds), Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts), 1949, pp. 459-71 and in Gardiner, op. cit., pp. 343-56.

4 I do not think that my use of an example that is simpler than Scriven's distorts the analysis.

5 Op. cit., p. 446.

6 Op. cit., p. 446.

7 Op. cit., p. 446; italics added.

8 This position is not vitiated by the fact that rules themselves are apparently among the things that may be justified. Don't we ask that laws (rules par excellence) be justified ? The answer is that more precision is called for: it is not the rule that is justified, but the holding of the rule; not the law is justified, but its promulgation or its application. Acts and nothing else are the sorts of things that are justified. Upon repeated demands for justifications, we present arguments showing why we hold or believe in rules of a higher and higher order. If and when we are pushed to a point where we must claim a rule to be a highest rule, we stop justifying. We do not justify holding that A is A, that induction is legitimate. Rules of that kind are not the sorts of things that can be justified.

9 Hempel, op. cit., (Feigl and Sellars), p. 460.

10 Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, “The Logic of Explanation,” Philosophy of Science, 1948; reprinted in H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck, Readings in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts), 1953, p. 322.

11 One further argument might be cited in support of the thesis that the statement of the law (L) cannot be a justifying ground of any kind. All justificatory arguments involve appeals to rules. L, however, is a general empirical statement correlating A's and B's. It is not a rule. I realize that this position flies in the face of a current view which holds that any statement Like L may be considered a rule, an inference ticket. According to this view “A therefore B” is an inference, i.e., a complete inference, while L is the ticket which makes the trip legitimate. I do not think that this view is correct. No matter how closely rules and certain empirical statements may be related, they are not the same. This is not the place, however, to open up the entire problem of the nature of inference.