The New Philosophy of Science and Its Lessons

Abstract

Until recently, it has been held that the laws of nature that lie at the heart of theories are universally quantified statements sufficiently capable of sustaining counterfactuals that they might well claim to limn the underlying structure of the world. From this perspective, theories are seen to be confirmed or falsified by treating putative laws as major premisses of hypothetical arguments from which, if the proposed law were true, and certain interfering contingencies are set aside, certain facts would be predicted. Experiments are then devised to test those predictions, and by this means to confirm or disconfirm the generalizations that generated the prediction in the first place. A major goal of science, on this account, is to use fewer and fewer laws to explain more and more facts, progressively ‘reducing’ the laws of restricted sciences to those of more basic ones. Explanations of particular facts and events, meanwhile, are achieved by employing confirmed laws as premisses from which what is to be explained can be deduced, with the help of ‘bridge laws’ that connect high-level generalizations with data about specific processes. On this view, it follows that prediction and explanation are logically identical. From a ‘covering law,’ together with statements about initial and boundary conditions, a statement about the state of the system either at a future time or a past time follows deductively. If predicted or retrodicted statements turn out to conform to experimental results, what was to be explained (explanandum) is treated as having been settled (Nagel, 1961; Hempel, 1965). How deeply this view of the scientific enterprise has penetrated our culture is indicated by the fact that it is commonly called ‘the received view’ by philosophers. This conception of ‘scientific method’ was widely dissiminated in America, right down to the grammar school level, in the aftermath of the Sputnik crisis, when science-minded liberals, emboldened by the ascendancy of logical empiricism and more generally of a modernist sensibility, consolidated their hold over the American educational system. One can forgive both teachers and students for thinking that this idea had a revered and well-established genealogy. But in point of fact this case illustrates a more generally applicable principle of historical interpretation: There is a strong correlation between what is most revered at any given