Also included in the premises can be sentences describing antecedent conditions. In the next few weeks, we will examine each of these accounts in turn, detailing their strengths and weaknesses. Today we will start with Hempel's inferential view, which goes by several other names that you might encounter. Hempel and Oppenheim consider patterns of explanation of a particular sort and try to generalize that pattern. The arguments they considered were deductive, i.e., arguments such that if the premises are true the conclusion has to be true as well.
All human beings are mortal.
Socrates is a human being. Socrates is mortal. Not every argument that is deductive is an explanation, however. Later, we will be looking at a statistical variant of this pattern, which allows the laws of nature to be statistical, and the resulting inference to be inductive. Since Hempel and Oppenheim's analysis is stated in terms of laws of nature, it is important to state what a law of nature is on their view.