Abstract
Fifty years ago, Carl Gustav Hempel published his famous book Aspects of Scientific Explanation. Since then the number of publications on this subject has grown exponentially. An occasion like this deserves to be commemorated. In this article I offer a modest tribute to this great methodologist of science. This paper tackles the uses of explanation in theoretical sciences. In particular it is concerned with the possibility of causal explanations in physics. What I intend to do is to focus on the issue of whether the explanation of the empirical Kepler’s laws of the planetary motions can be a causal explanation. More specifically my point is: can the deductive subsumption of Kepler’s 3rd Law (also known as Kepler’s 1-2-3 law) under theoretical principles provide a causal explanation for the planetary motions? My answer is a definitive no. As a matter of fact, on occasion subsumptions occur under differing theoretical principles that are incompatible with one another. In such cases we would have incompatible scientific explanations. This is precisely the situation facing the scientific explanation of Kepler’s laws, in particular the third law. Since there exist incompatible gravitational theories, it is impossible for the scientific account of Kepler’s law to be a causal explanation of the planetary motions. This is just one example of the difficulties faced by causal explanations in sciences such as theoretical physics.
Highlights
In an interview with the Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, published in the Spanish newspaper El País on Sunday August 2, 2015, the interviewer Pablo Guimón asks Chang if economics is a science
If theoretical physics allows for the existence of several incompatible explanations of the same phenomenon, the concept of causal explanation has no sense in it, unless one of the competing theories is wrong and the other true
Talking of causal explanations introduces a fascinating element in our expectations about science because it channels the scientific activity through the path of the search of the form of things themselves, of being able to get in touch with reality and to give a complete and accurate description of how and why the world is as it looks like
Summary
In an interview with the Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, published in the Spanish newspaper El País on Sunday August 2, 2015, the interviewer Pablo Guimón asks Chang if economics is a science. That is, facing the paralyzing position of Hume, which threatened to produce the collapse of scientific practice, or convert it in a by-product of everyday psychology, science and philosophy, walking as almost always hand in hand, offered ingenious and fertile alternatives to the problem of the investigation of causes. This is not the issue that I tackle in this paper. Cases of theoretical explanations presented in Rivadulla (2004, pp. 71-84) speak for themselves
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