Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Carl Gustav Hempel...logical positivism/logical empiricism
Not exactly a household name and a movement, logical positivism/logical empiricist, that has fallen out of favor much like many others.
German-born U.S. philosopher who was one of the leaders of the Berlin school of logical positivism. The group viewed the task of science as that of showing phenomena to be the consequence of unbroken laws. He emigrated to the USA in 1937 because of Nazism. With Paul Oppenheim, he published an account of the deductive- nomological explanation. In this model, the explanation of a fact is reduced to a logical relationship between statements: the explanandum is a consequence of the explanans. This is a common method of logical positivism. Pragmatic aspects of explanation are not taken into consideration. Another feature is that an explanation requires scientific laws; facts are explained when they are subsumed under laws.
"In Memoriam: CARL GUSTAV HEMPEL (January 8th 1905–November 9th 1997)" by Richard Jeffrey
Carl Gustav Hempel (1905—1997) [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Carl Gustav Hempel [Wikipedia]