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H2O: Hempel-Helmer-Oppenheim, an Episode in the History of Scientific Philosophy in the 20th Century

Preface. Almost fifty years ago, in 1948, when I was an undergraduate at Queens College in New York and a student of Carl G. Hempel's, I received from his hands an offprint of his now-classic but then justpublished paper "Studies in the Logic of Explanation", written in collaboration with Paul Oppenheim and then just published in Philosophy of Science (15[1948], pp. 135-75).1 This paper greatly impressed meand I was not alone. We have here one of those unusual publications that sets the agenda for a whole generation of investigators. It set in train an enormous body of discussions and publications which shaped the course of deliberations about scientific explanation over the next decades-an effort to which my own work also made some contributions. (This literature and its inherent dialectic has been examined and analyzed in close and interesting detail in Wesley Salmon's fine survey of Four Decades of Scientific Explanation.2) However my present aim is not to consider what came out of the Hempel-Oppenheim paper but what went into it. I want, in sum, to consider the prehistory of that era of scientific explanation studies-and to look more closely at the background ramifications of this paper that launched a thousand others.