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Narrative Explanation and Redescription
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Over the past decade numerous philosophers have devoted considerable effort to explicating and defending the claim that narrative can be a satisfactory form of explanation. Much of this interest in narrative has taken the form of a reaction against the covering-law model of explanation-particularly against the claim that that model is applicable to history and to what W. B. Gallie has called “the genetic sciences.” What has been lacking from most of this discussion of narrative is any very clear indication of just what narrative is or any extended attempt to delineate its logical features. The philosophical yield of introducing the concept “narrative” into discussions of explanation has frequently appeared to be very small.
In a recent paper Michael Ruse has argued that the logical structure of explanations relating to the theory of evolution can be examined more helpfully by using the covering-law model than by using a narrative model of explanation.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1974
References
1 Hempel, Carl has been the most prolific proponent of the covering-law model over the past three decades. His most important writings on the model can be found among the essays collected in his Aspects of Scientific Explanation(New York, Free Press, 1965), pp. 229–496.Google Scholar According to Hempel's exposition of the model, the explanans of a scientific explanation will consist of (1) a set of statements asserting the occurrence of certain events and (2). a law or group of laws. If these laws are of universal scope, one can then deduce the explanandum (the statement asserting the occurrence of the event to be explained) from the explanans. If they are probability laws, the relationship between the explanans and explanandum will be inductive. For Gallie's, views, see his “Explanations in History and the Genetic Sciences,” in Gardiner, Patrick ed., Theories of History (New York, Free Press, 1959), pp. 386–402.Google Scholar
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