ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book suggests that to study scientific explanation, the crucial step is to understand scientific laws. "Six decades of scientific explanation," the author reviews Wesley Salmon's three conceptions in the development of scientific explanation after Carl Gustav Hempel. It discusses the relation between explanation and reduction. The book argues that the natural sciences and the human sciences can be methodologically unified. It examines several related issues; for example, the connection between explanation and reduction, the relation between explanation and interpretation, etc. The book analyses the two main approaches to the discussion of laws of nature, the regularity approach and the necessitarian approach. All three concepts, scientific explanation, laws of nature, and causation, are central issues in the philosophy of science. Explanation, laws, and causation are closely connected, too.
