Читать книгу Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition) - Thomas J. Hickey - Страница 30

Explanation describes the occurrence of individual events and conditions as caused by the occurrence of other described events and conditions according to law statements.

Pragmatists recognize modus ponens nontruth-functional deductive logical argument with the hypothetical conditional statement form that includes universally quantified statements expressible in conditional form that are scientific laws. Whenever possible the explanation is predictive.

Laws are said to be “explained” in the sense that a set of logically related laws may form a deductive system partitioned into dichotomous subsets of explaining antecedent axioms and explained consequent theorems.