What's the Matter with the Deductive Nomological Model

The philosophical discussion about mathematical explanation has inherited the very same sense of dissatisfaction that philosophers of science expressed, in the context of scientific explanation, towards the famous deductive-nomological model. This model is regarded as unable to cover cases of mathematical explanations and, furthermore, it is largely ignored in the relevant literature. Surprisingly enough, the reasons for this ostracism are not sufficiently manifest among philosophers of mathematics. In this paper, I consider a possible extension of the deductive nomological model to the case of mathematical explanations in science and I claim that there are at least two good reasons to judge the deductive-nomological picture of explanation as inadequate in that context: it cannot deal with mathematical operations or procedures which play a key role in explanatory practices but which do not come under the form of statements; it is not a sufficiently good indicator of the intuitions coming from the scientific practice, thus imposing a picture of explanation which is not authentic.