Scientific Explanation
Science and scientific knowledge achieved high status in twentieth-century Western societies, yet there continues to be disagreement among scientists and those who study science (historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science) about the meaning of scientific explanation. Indeed, the use of the word "explanation" has been the subject of heated debate (Keat and Urry 1982).
One way to make sense of science is to "reconstruct" the logic scientists use to produce scientific knowledge. The reconstructed logic of science differs from what scientists actually do when they engage in research. The research process is seldom as clear, logical, and straightforward as the reconstructed logic presented in this article makes it appear. For a long time, the most popular reconstruction of the logic of the scientific process was the "hypothetico-deductive" model. In this model, "the scientist, by a combination of careful observation, shrewd guesses, and scientific intuition arrives at a set of postulates governing the phenomena in which he is interested; from these he deduces observable consequences; he then tests these consequences by experiment, and so confirms or disconfirms the postulates, replacing them, where necessary, by others, and so continuing" (Kaplan 1964, pp. 9–10; see also Braithwaite 1968; Nagel 1961). The description of scientific explanation presented here is broadly consistent with this model as it is used in the social sciences.
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