"Now this is the verbal part of your employment test," said the interviewer. "Can you tell me what gross aggrandized annuity means?"
"Certainly," replied the applicant. "It means I don't get the job."
Carl Gustav HempelDied 9 Nov 1997 at age 92 (born 8 Jan 1905).German-born U.S. philosopher who was one of the leaders of the Berlin school of logical positivism. The group viewed the task of science as that of showing phenomena to be the consequence of unbroken laws. He emigrated to the USA in 1937 because of Nazism.With Paul Oppenheim, he published an account of the deductive- nomological explanation. In this model, the explanation of a fact is reduced to a logical relationship between statements: the explanandum is a consequence of the explanans. This is a common method of logical positivism. Pragmatic aspects of explanation are not taken into consideration. Another feature is that an explanation requires scientific laws; facts are explained when they are subsumed under laws. |
