ABSTRACT
According to Popper (OK, p. 191), the aim of science is ‘to find satisfactory explanations of whatever strikes us as being in need of explanation’. This is done when we are able to formulate an explicans which will have as a consequence not only the explicandum but other, independently testable, consequences. In order to prevent an explanation being offered which simply conjoined the explicandum with some otherwise unconnected testable statement, Popper requires further that the explicans takes the form of a statement of universal law from which, given suitable initial conditions, both the explicandum and the other consequences can be deduced. It is to be emphasized that this account of explanation (which Popper takes to apply to the social sciences as much as to the physical sciences) is completely free of any psychological overtones. There is no suggestion that the explicans is itself intuitively obvious, or even less unfamiliar than the explicandum. In fact, Popper sees the general direction of scientific explanation as being from the known to the unknown, because the universal law statements will typically involve reference to the underlying structural properties of matter, including unobservable entities and forces, which are supposed to be the causes of the phenomena we do observe.
