23 Explanation and forecasting
Marcel Boumans
Introduction
An explanation is an answer to a why question. Finding such a kind of answer is generally considered to be the core activity of science. But not every answer to a why question is scientific. Therefore it needs to meet certain requirements. The most dominant requirement in science is that a scientific explanation should show some event or some regularity to be an instance of a fundamental law. Carl Hempel (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948) developed this view into what is called the deductive-nomological model of explanation or covering-law model.
In a deductive-nomological explanation, a statement of what is to be explained (the explanandum) is deduced from ...
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