This paper describes the development of theories of scientific explanation since Hempel's earliest models in the 1940ies. It focuses on deductive and probabilistic whyexplanations and their main problems: lawlikeness, explanation-prediction asymmetries, causality, deductive and probabilistic relevance, maximal specifity and homogenity, the height of the probability value. For all of these topic the paper explains the most important approaches as well as their criticism, including the author's own accounts. Three main theses of this paper are: (1) Both deductive and probabilistic explanations (...) are important in science, not reducible to each other. (2) One must distinguish between (cause giving) explanations and (reason giving) justifications and predictions. (3) The adequacy of deductive as well as probabilistic explanations is relative to a pragmatically given background knowledge-which does not exclude, however, the possibility of purely semantic models. (shrink)

The article tries to demonstrate how the tools and perspectives of action theory may be used in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics. In the first part, some concepts and principles of action theory are reconstructed and used to sketch a view of medicine as a science of actions. The second part is a contribution to the discussion on medical ethics in the same issue of this journal and consists in a detailed analysis of the main arguments and critical remarks (...) from the point of view of action theory. (shrink)

I am most grateful that the Editor of Inquiry has invited these scholars to comment upon my Logic and Society (hereafter LS). The symposiasts have acutely singled out a number of statements in my book that are wrong, incomplete or ambiguous. They also provide important further suggestions, supplementing my own ideas in fertile ways. And at times they fail to understand what I was trying to do, or they advance objections that I cannot accept. I shall first react to a (...) general point raised in several of the papers, and then deal with each paper in turn. (shrink)