Carl G. Hempel
From Philosopedia
Hempel, Carl Gustav (8 January 1905 - 9 November 1997)
Born in Oranienburg, Germany, Hempel studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Universities of Göttingen, Heidelberg, Vienna, and Berlin, working under Hans Reichenbach and receiving a doctorate from the latter in 1934 for work on probability. After fleeing Nazism to Belgium, he moved on to the United States in 1938.
He became known for his rigorous empirical approach to scientific logic, taught at City College of New York, Queens College in Flushing, Yale University, and the University of Pittsburgh. He taught at Princeton University from 1955 to 1973.
The last surviving member of the Vienna Circle, he loathed the irrational and mystical thinking of late-19th-century Europe. With other similarly-minded philosophers, he advocated what was called “logical positivism,” which argued that whatever could not be verified by experience was meaningless.
According to his former student, Adolf Grünbaum, Hempel’s writings were so influential that for decades almost any rival theory of scientific explanation took his work as a point of departure. In 1948 he produced his deductive-nomological theory, which holds that scientific conclusions are best deduced using logic and a larger law, or nomos in Greek. He built a precise mathematical foundation for explaining statistical, or probabilistic, answers. If a patient asks doctor about the chance of a cure, the doctor’s explanation might, for example, be given as a probability - that in a given percentage of cases there is a cure. “That is an informal statement,” he added. “It needed a systematic form.”
He then developed a model that served many philosophers as a master model. He also dealt with how scientists gain confidence in a hypothesis in the first place. He developed models of the philosophy of confirmation in which a hypothesis is confirmed not only by findings but also by being in accord with larger principles, like historical or functional explanations. These models shaped all subsequent work on scientific explanation, observed Ford Burkhart in a New York Times obituary (23 November 1997).
Hempel wrote Studies in the Logic of Confirmation (1945); Studies in the Logic of Explanation (1948), and Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (1965).
