ABSTRACT
Although issues having to do with the nature of explanation, both in science and in ordinary life, have figured importantly in philosophy from the pre-Socratics onwards, discussion of this topic in contemporary philosophy of science really begins with the formulation of the deductive-nomological (D-N) model in the middle part of the twentieth century. As is almost always true in philosophy, there are many earlier (and roughly contemporaneous) statements of the basic idea, but what has come to be regarded as the canonical version is due to Carl Hempel (1965a). Hempel’s work initiated extensive discussion and the development of a number of competing models of scientific explanation, developments that continue to this day.
