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The inductive aspect of scientific explanation is often ignored in philosophical and methodological studies in sociological, psychological and historical explanation. In particular, many critics of the deductive covering law model of explanation seem to implicitly assume that their arguments mutatis mutandis apply to inductive explanations as well. A more sophisticated position is held by G.H. von Wright, who does not discuss inductive explanations in his work Explanation and Understanding - except for brief and interesting comments in the introductory chapter. There von Wright explicitly states his reasons for the intentional omission of these kinds of explanations from the rest of his book; he thinks that inductive-probabilistic explanations in Hempel's well-known model are not genuine explanations at all, but only instances of reason-giving argumentation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1823-4_16

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