Abstract

Rejecting the idea that the principal aim of science is prediction, the author claims that science tries to create an explanatory intelligible system "with some legitimate claim to reality"; he argues that the intellectual framework within which this construction proceeds is revealed more by its presuppositions and its "explanatory paradigms" or "ideals of natural order" than by its detailed results. Comparing the dynamical theories of Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton, he asks which occurrences are "phenomena" for these theories, i.e., deviations from the expected standard manner in which bodies move. He concludes that to explain a phenomenon is to show that it is a special case of, or a complex combination of, paradigms taken as fundamental, and that theories are not to be judged as true or false, but as helpful, fruitful, misleading, and the like. --B. J. H.