Although the section we will discuss on Friday is something of digression in the context of this paper, Hempel went on to write more on this topic, emphasizing the applicability of his model of explanation outside the physical sciences and, in particular, to explanations in history.
After beginning with some historical examples where his model seems to apply naturally, Hempel looks at objections and doubts. He considers quite a variety of these, but I’ll suggest that we focus on three groups. In each case, Hempel has choice of saying that an apparently non-deductive-nomological explanation really does use deduction from laws (despite appearances) or that it is really not an explanation. Think which sort of response (or what mixture of the two) he offers in each case.
• Explanation by motives or purposes in history and social sciences (pp. 213-214, 216-217). This issue has sometimes been framed in terms of a distinction between reasons and causes.
• Teleological or functional explanation in biology (pp. 214-215). A “teleological” explanation is an explanation in terms of ends or goals. A typical case is explanation of some feature of an organ by pointing to its function in the organism.
• Neo-vitalism (pp. 215-216). This issue is of mainly historical interest. Hempel seems to have in mind the views of Hans Driesch (1867-1941), who did important experimental work in embryology early in the 20th century and went on in the following decades to develop a position on the philosophy of biology based on an idea of “entelechy” (a term he borrowed from Aristotle) that he held to be fundamentally different from the concepts of the physical sciences. (“Vitalism” is the view that living things have a fundamentally different character from “dead” matter.)