What is Good Science: The Function of General Laws in History
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"The Functioning of General Laws in History" (1942) is an Article by Carl Gustav Hempel that was published in Readings in the philosophy of science (ISBN 0-262-63151-2).
Summary
- General laws (or universal hypothesis) have analogous functions in history and the natural sciences; they are an indispensable instrument of historical research (p.43)
- A general law is a statement of universal conditional form which is capable of being confirmed or disconfirmed by suitable empirical findings (p.43)
- Example:
- a universal hypothesis may be assumed to assert a regularity of the following type: In every case where an event of a specified kind C occurs at a certain place and time, an event of a specified kind E will occur at a place and time which is related in a specified manner to the place and time of the occurrence of the first event (p.43)
- the main function of general laws in the natural sciences is to connect events in patterns which are usually referred to as explanation or prediction (p.43)
- the scientific explanation of the event in question (of an event of some specific kind E at a certain place and time) consists of
- a set of statements (determining conditions) asserting the occurrence of certain events C1, ….., Cn (= properties of the events, not the events themselves) at certain times and places,
- a set of universal hypotheses, such that
- the statements of both groups are reasonably well confirmed by empirical evidence,
- from the two groups of statements the sentence asserting the occurrence of event E can be logically deduced (p.43/44)
- but!: it is impossible to give a complete explanation of an individual event in the sense of accounting for all its properties by means of universal hypotheses! (p.44)
- there is no difference between history and the natural sciences: both can give an account of their subject matter only in general terms (p.44)
- scientific prediction (no prophecy, but rational scientific anticipation resting on the assumption of general laws) in empirical science consists in deriving a statement about a certain future event from (1) statements describing certain known (past or present) conditions and (2) suitable universal hypotheses (p.45)
- -> the logical structure of a scientific prediction is the same as that of a scientific explanation (p.45)
- do not forget: this goes for explanation in history as well as for any other branch of empirical science (p.46)
- criticism: many historians deny the possibility of resorting to any general laws in history (p.46); most explanations put forward in history/sociology/social sciences do not include an explicit statement of general regularities (they presuppose) (p.47); often, the content of the hypotheses which are assumed in an explanation can be reconstructed only quite approximately (p.47)
- 2 reasons:
- since general statements often stem from psychology, they are taken for granted
- it is difficult to formulate the underlying assumptions with sufficient precision and bring them into agreement with the determining conditions
- It is justifiable to construe certain explanation offered in history as based on the assumption of probability hypotheses rather than of general “deterministic” laws, i.e. laws in the form of universal conditionals (p. 48)
- -> the occurrence of the event to be explained is made highly probable by the initial conditions in view of the probability hypotheses (p.48)
- In general: In most cases, the explanatory analyses of historical events do not offer an explanation as indicated above, but something that might be called an explanation sketch (p.48)
- Such a sketch consists of a vague indication of the laws and initial conditions considered as relevant, and it needs some “filling out” in order to turn into a full-fledged explanation (p.48)
- Although an explanation sketch does not admit of an empirical test to the same extent as does a complete explanation, there is still a difference between a scientifically acceptable explanation sketch and a pseudo-explanation sketch
- This is so, because a scientific explanation sketch involves a filling-out process which will bring about a gradual increase in the precision of the respective formulations (p.48)
- the method of empathic understanding, which is often used by historians to investigate historical cases, is rather a heuristic device since it does not add to the soundness of general hypotheses (p.49/50)
- in general, mark!: (p.52)
- there is no separation of “pure description” and “hypothetical generalisation and theory-construction” in empirical sciences
- neither is there a separation between the different fields of scientific research
Critique / Questions / Reflection / Comments
