Three treatments of scientific explanation (Carl Hempel, B. A. Brody, Nancy Cartwright)

What I demonstrate in this thesis is that Carl Hempel's famous covering-law model for scientific explanation can be defended from two recent criticisms offered by B. A. Brody and Nancy Cartwright. In his deductive-nomological account of explanation, Hempel outlines a method for subsuming a statement of an empirical phenomenon under both a set of laws and a set of statements describing antecedent conditions for the particular phenomenon. Taken together, these sets of statements logically deduce to a statement of the phenomenon to be explained. Brody's criticism against this model claims that it allows explanations with little or no explanatory power, and so the model, as it stands, must be accompanied by additional conditions of adequacy. Cartwright's criticism states that the laws of nature which Hempel subsumes hold only under ideal conditions and thus cannot be generalized in the way Hempel needs them to be.