Carl Hempel 1905 – 1997
Carl Gustav Hempel was a German-American philosopher of science and one of the most influential members of the logical empiricist tradition. After early association with the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, he emigrated to the United States, where he held chairs at Yale and Princeton. His articulation of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, his celebrated raven paradox of confirmation, and his patient critique of the verifiability criterion of meaning shaped twentieth-century philosophy of science. His Aspects of Scientific Explanation collected the essays that defined the field for two decades.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German-American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Carl Hempel:
“Scientific explanation subsumes the explanandum under general laws.”
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Attributed to Carl Hempel:
“The raven paradox shows the deep difficulty of the concept of confirmation.”
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Attributed to Carl Hempel:
“Empirical significance is a matter of degree, not of presence or absence.”
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Attributed to Carl Hempel:
“A scientific law is more than a generalization; it must support counterfactuals.”
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Attributed to Carl Hempel:
“Logical empiricism gave way to logical empiricism for good reasons.”