The word explanation occurs so continuously, and has so important a place in philosophy, that a little time spent in fixing the meaning of it will be profitably employed.
– John Stuart Mill (1843: 548)
Abstract
The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers of science, many of whom have assimilated their conception of explanation to the ontic conception.
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Notes
Note that the truism that understanding (epistemic) is a norm on good explanation is not impugned by Trout’s (2002) lesson that sense of understanding (psychological) is not.
Another reason why is that some New Mechanists have worried that if the default sense of explain is a communicative one, then the only norms governing explanation will be communicative norms (e.g., Craver 2007: ch. 2; see, also Forge 1999: 13). However, this conditional is demonstrably false. Nothing about the meaning of explain itself prevents a conception of explanation from safeguarding the objectivity of explanation, accommodating a role for causal reasoning and its attendant norms, etc. In particular, New Mechanists can accept that causal-mechanical structures in the world provide constraints on explanatory quality without thereby being committed to rendering mechanistic explanations ontically; for example, advocates of a broadly epistemic conception of explanation (EC) can fully and cheerfully adopt less metaphorical versions of Craver’s (2007: 26) five norms, and many others besides. So the initial worry is misplaced.
More specifically, the overarching thesis of OC identifies scientific explanations with in re exhibitions of fitness relations between events and (causal) patterns or regularities, such that to explain an event e is to exhibit how e fits into a (causal) pattern or regularity. Craver (personal communication) doubts the fidelity of this formulation. On his reading of Salmon, in re exhibition is irrelevant to OC; instead, what Salmon really meant was that the causal-mechanical patterns and regularities into which events fit are what is explanatory (personal communication). Note, however, that accounts of the causal-mechanical patterns and regularities within which explananda are fit are insufficient to illuminate OC. Such accounts are accounts of the patterns and regularities, and the events or mechanistic activities thereof, that comprise the causal structure of the world. They are not accounts of the fitting of explananda into those patterns, nor accounts of what the in re exhibitions of those fittings are, from which it follows that they are also not yet accounts of scientific explanations according to OC. This point would be question-begging were it not for the fact that the above formulation, which Craver finds dubious, is backed by extensive textual evidence. It recurred, mutatis mutandis, throughout the last 25 years of Salmon’s research: e.g., ‘[OC] sees a scientific explanation as an exhibition of the ways in which what is to be explained fits into natural patterns or regularities in the world’ (Salmon 1998: 320; see also, e.g., 1975: 120, 145; 1977: 162; 1978: 700; 1984: 18–19, 121–2, 239, 274, 276; 1989: 86, 93, 121, 134; 1998: 54, 64, 71, 111, 325, 328). Defenders and critics alike have also rehearsed this very formulation of OC, as well as many others that are at most trivially different. Ironically, this includes Craver’s own gloss on OC: ‘to explain something, one might plausibly argue, just is to show how it fits into the causal structure of the world’ (2009: 578). It also includes Glennan, who described OC as the conception that ‘explanations exhibit causal mechanisms’ (2002: S343 (however, he also misdescribes it—I believe out of charity—as some kind of generic representational realism just a page later)).
Instead, the term exhibition was merely exchanged with various cognates (e.g., show, reveal, disclose, lay bare, present, demonstrate, indicate, etc.)—cognates which themselves are nothing more than what Craver (2007: 113) aptly called filler terms. This makes it entirely unclear whether anyone—Salmon included—has ever seriously endorsed OC, or otherwise been rationally committed to it.
This is not to say that total consensus has been achieved. A few New Mechanists have recently turned to a broadly epistemic conception (see, e.g., Wright 2002; Waskan 2006, 2008; Wright & Bechtel 2007; Bechtel 2008: 18; Kaplan 2011). But for statements of the view I am describing as standard, see, e.g., Glennan’s (1996, 2002, 2005) and Craver’s (2007) causal-mechanical accounts of explanation, each of which descends directly and explicitly from OC. See also Forge’s (1986, 1998, 1999) so-called instance conception and Strevens’ (2008) so-called kairetic account, both of which are compatible with or sympathetic to the assimilation of MC to OC.
As this passage alludes, many New Mechanists seem torn between stressing the representational role of mechanism sketches, schemas, and models in scientific understanding, on one hand, and steadfastly clutching an ontic rendering of MC on the other. The tension has resulted in a bit of ‘code-switching’ between ontic and non-ontic construals, as convenient. See, e.g., Glennan (2002), Bechtel & Abrahamsen (2005), Craver (2005, 2006, 2009), Darden (2008), and Piccinini & Craver (2011).
Salmon was certainly no leading exponent of ordinary language philosophy. So it is rather mystifying why he would seek to motivate OC by appealing to ‘non-philosophical contexts’; for it is precisely in such contexts that the commitments of non-literal, unreflective forms of speech are legitimized as ‘appropriate’. Why not instead say that the non-philosophical contexts in which misconceived speech seems appropriate are precisely the wrong contexts in which to develop philosophical theories of explanation? Either way, the dispute is not about where to locate gravitational attraction or fluctuations in temperature—so much is obvious; rather, it is about whether explanations are located amongst them.
To his credit, Forge is one of the few advocates of OC to self-critically tackle the issue head on: ‘[w]hat is it that justifies the claim that an explanation is a state of affairs in the world of something fitting into a pattern?’ (1999: 13). Unfortunately, his response was the underwhelming false dichotomy that explanations must be ontic if or because they are not answers.
Strevens’s claim about explanantia being sets of causal facts is not what distinguishes his version of OC from the standard view of New Mechanists. For example, although Glennan often speaks of explanantia as being objects, properties, behaviors, and processes, he elsewhere construes explanantia in terms of a fact-based ontology: e.g., ‘[t]he fact that the [generalization about Coke-dispensing machine] is true is explained by facts about how the Coke machine works’ (2005: 446). Moreover, this construal harks directly from Salmon himself (1989: 176; see also 1984: 274; Craver 2007: 27; Glennan 2010).
In addition to distinguishing Craverian objective explanations, which are ‘portions of the causal structure of the world’, from actual explanations, we should also distinguish them from the objectivity of explanations. Pace Craver, objective explanations are extra-representational; likewise, Salmon’s claim that objective relationships hold between genuine explanans and explananda can be interpreted as nothing more than that genuine explanatory relationships are objective. But explanatory objectivity—like truth or maximal accuracy—is primarily a property of representations, and the bifurcation of explanation into objective and something else certainly does not follow from the subjectivity or objectivity of explanations in any epistemic sense.
The assumption might not seem utterly unreasonable; for only if there is more than one sense to spell out in the first place does it make sense to articulate them. But this settles nothing. We want to know what motivates and warrants the assumption that explanation is ambiguous, and this knowledge does not fall out of our agreement that a condition on the possibility of equivocation is that there be multiple senses over which to equivocate in the first place, or that, if by explanation we give voice to the different ways of construing what explanations are, then it appears that explanation is ambiguous, de facto.
For example, Strevens (2008: 6, 319) states that there are two senses or ways of talking about explanation (the ontic way, and some other way (usually epistemic, pragmatic, or cognitive)) and then asserts that most philosophers of explanation give precedence to the former way of speaking. What goes missing are reasons for thinking that these two ways are expressed by the term explanation, de facto, or that the ontic way is conceptually basic and philosophically useful; where there should be an argument, we find merely a preference for a certain style of speech. See also Craver (2007: 27) and McKay Illari & Williamson (2010: 280).
For a preferred overview of linguistic theory and description, see Langacker (2008).
Besides the Oxford English Dictionary, see, e.g., the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, or the Random House Unabridged, American Heritage, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, as well as other lexiographic databases like WordNet or MetaGlossary.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing my attention to this point.
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Acknowledgements
Portions of this paper descend from Wright (2002); earlier versions of its arguments were presented at the Central APA in Spring 2004, the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology colloquium at Washington University in St. Louis in Spring 2008 and again at the Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science at Universiteit van Tilburg in Summer 2008. I am grateful to Sorin Bangu, Carl Hoefer, Edouard Machery, Maurice Schouten, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism.
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Wright, C.D. Mechanistic explanation without the ontic conception. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 2, 375–394 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-012-0048-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-012-0048-8