Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The explanatory virtue of abstracting away from idiosyncratic and messy detail

  • Published:
Philosophical Studies Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Some explanations are relatively abstract: they abstract away from the idiosyncratic or messy details of the case in hand. The received wisdom in philosophy is that this is a virtue for any explanation to possess. I argue that the apparent consensus on this point is illusory. When philosophers make this claim, they differ on which of four alternative varieties of abstractness they have in mind. What’s more, for each variety of abstractness there are several alternative reasons to think that the variety of abstractness in question is a virtue. I identify the most promising reasons, and dismiss some others. The paper concludes by relating this discussion to the idea that explanations in biology, psychology and social science cannot be replaced by relatively micro explanations without loss of understanding.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See Putnam (1973, 296–297), Garfinkel (1981, 91–96), Kitcher (1984), Marras (1993, 279), Antony (1999, 16) as well as Kincaid (1986, 40–43), Kincaid (1993, 24), Kincaid (1997a) and Potochnik (2010, 69) for talk of ‘capturing’ ‘highlighting’ or ‘bringing out’ patterns. Marchionni (2008) talks of ‘breadth’; and MacDonald (1985, 210) of ‘generality’.

  2. See footnotes in Sect. 7.

  3. See the extensive citations throughout this paper. Indeed, as will be evident from the frequent citation of Fodor’s work, the abstractness thesis is very similar to Fodor’s infamous multiple-realizability thesis (Fodor 1974).

  4. The generalization ‘All ravens are black’ is logically equivalent to ‘All non-black things aren’t ravens’. So here we have a generalization whose primary jurisdiction is all ravens, but which is logically equivalent to a generalization whose primary jurisdiction is all non-black things. So there’s a sense in which a generalization of the form ‘All Fs are G’ has two sorts of primary jurisdiction. See Sober (1999, footnote 9) for this worry. Note, however, that if the conditionals C in generalizations like G1 are read as Lewisean or Woodwardian conditionals, then these generalizations will not have the logical form ‘All Fs are G’, and so this problem is averted.

  5. This is because it is often goes unnoticed that the argument in Fodor (1997) is a considerable the advance over Fodor (1974). For example Jaworski (2002) and Sawyer (2002) treat Fodor 1974 and Fodor 1997 as offering the same argument.

  6. Note that Fodor talks about explanation implicitly, rather than explicitly. Sober (1999, footnote 17) presents a similar reading to my own, although there are some noteworthy differences.

  7. See Armstrong (1983) and Little (1993) for example for this ambiguous talk of ‘scope’.

  8. My treatment bears some similarity to Jackson and Pettit’s (1992) treatment of similar cases. One important difference is that my account shows that the logically modest assertion provides both more ‘modally comparative’ information and more ‘modally contrastive’ information—to use their terminology. Jackson and Pettit are mistaken when they claim that logically modest assertions provide more comparative information, and logically bold assertions provide more contrastive information. My treatment also has affinities with that of Marchionni (2008) who also appeals to implicit explanatory contrasts.

  9. To see the difference, consider a hybrid explanation that included both this logically modest factor and this logically bold factor.

  10. See Weatherson (2012), Shaprio and Sober (2012), and Franklin-Hall (Forthcoming, §5) for various problems.

  11. See Putnam (1973, 296), Block (1995, §3.3) and Weslake (2010) for this view. Marchionni (2008) and Potochnik (2010) endorses a qualified version of this view too.

  12. See Sober (1999) and Weslake (2010, 291) for illustrations of this ambiguity.

  13. Haug (2011a) may also interpret Fodor (1997) this way, but I’m skeptical of this interpretation.

  14. Kincaid (1986, 40–43) makes an interesting distinction between ‘type explanations’ and ‘token explanations’ and says that this argument is focusing on the former. See Marras (1993, 196) for a similar idea.

  15. It is fair to interpret Fodor (1974), as Kincaid does, as making a similar claim: syntactic simplicity is required for a concept to feature in explanatory generalizations. But Fodor confesses that his argument for this claim is somewhat circular (102). This is in contrast to Fodor’s more developed (1997) treatment, which I discussed in Sect. 2.

  16. For one thing, see Sober (1988) for a compelling argument that the importance of instance confirmability has been overstated. I should also note, however, that my contention here leaves open the question of whether evidential status can ever serve as a rough indicator of explanatory virtue. Antony (1999), for example, would say that instance confirmability indicates that a generalization refers to natural kinds, and thereby indicates its explanatory virtue.

  17. No worries if you think that it’s ingestees not ingestions that possess the powers.

  18. As Haug (2011b, §5) urges, however, the following reasoning would still apply if one drops this pretense. Simply replace ‘morphine’ with a very long disjunction of all the possible vaso-suppressants.

  19. Although Haug (2011b, 253, 257) accepts this, one might dispute this. One might prefer instead to say that the ingestion of morphine is a distinct event from the ingestion of a vaso-suppresant. It’s just that the two events are necessarily concurrent. But see Clarke (Manuscript-b) for an argument that my conclusion follows anyway: necessarily concurrent events have exactly the same causal powers.

  20. This is tantamount to Haug’s (2011b, 253) rejection of what he calls the Absolute Closure principle.

  21. Perhaps VS doesn’t quite pragmatically imply this, but VS at least makes this proposition more cognitively salient.

  22. Many would argue that this epidemiologist has not identified what caused this phenomenon, but rather what caused each of the mereological parts of this phenomenon, as it were. See Putnam (1973, 296–298) and Garfinkel (1981) for advocates of this extreme skepticism. Jackson and Pettit (1992), Kincaid (1997a), Sober (1999) and Marchionni (2008) repudiate it. See Owens (1989) for an excellent discussion of the general issues involved. See Kitcher (1984), MacDonald (1992, 86, 90–92) and Haug (2011a, 1150) for the claim that the present explanation includes irrelevant details.

References

  • Antony, L. M. (1999). Multiple realizability, projectability, and the reality of mental properties. Philosophical Topics, 26, 1–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Antony, L. M., & Levine, J. (1997). Reduction with autonomy. Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 83–105.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. M. (1983). What is a law of nature?. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Block, N. (1995). The mind as the software of the brain. In D. N. Osherson, L. Gleitman, S. M. Kosslyn, S. Smith, & S. Sternberg (Eds.), An Invitation to cognitive science (pp. 170–185). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cartwright, N. (2007). Hunting causes and using them. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, C. Manuscript A. How to define higher level explanations. Unpublished Manuscript.

  • Clarke, C. Manuscript B. Micro structuralism defended via difference making principles. Unpublished Manuscript.

  • Fodor, J. (1974). Special sciences (or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis). Synthese, 28, 97–115.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. (1997). Special sciences: still autonomous after all these years. Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 149–163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Franklin-Hall, L. R. Forthcoming. High-level explanation and the interventionist’s ’variables problem’. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, axu040.

  • Garfinkel, A. (1981). Forms of explanation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goodman, N. (1954). Fact, fiction and forecast. Athlone. Citations refer to 2nd edition (Harvard University Press, 1983).

  • Haug, M. C. (2011a). Abstraction and explanatory relevance; or, why do the special sciences exist? Philosophy of Science, 78, 1143–1155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haug, M. C. (2011b). Natural properties and the special sciences. The Monist, 94, 244–266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hempel, C. G., & Oppenheim, P. (1948). Studies in the logic of explanation. Philosophy of Science, 15, 135–175.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, F., & Pettit, P. (1992). In defence of explanatory ecumenism. Economics and Philosophy, 8, 1–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jaworski, W. (2002). Multiple-realizability, explanation and the disjunctive move. Philosophical Studies, 108, 289–308.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1986). Reduction, explanation and individualism. Philosophy of Science, 53, 492–513. Cited as revised in Kincaid (1997b) chapter 3.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1987). Supervenience doesn’t entail reducibility. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 25, 342–356.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1988). Supervenience and explanation. Synthese, 77, 251–281.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1990). Molecular biology and the unity of science. Philosophy of Science, 57, 575–593. Cited as revised in Kincaid (1997b) chapter 4.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1993). The empirical nature of the individualism-holism dispute. Synthese, 97, 229–247. Cited as revised in Kincaid (1997b) chapter 2.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1996). Philosophical foundations of the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1997a). Defending non-reductive unity. Chapter 5 of individualism and the unity of science. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Revision of Kincaid (1987) and Kincaid (1988).

    Google Scholar 

  • Kincaid, H. (1997b). Individualism and the unity of the sciences. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kitcher, P. (1981). Explanatory unification. Philosophy of Science, 48, 507–531.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kitcher, P. (1984). 1953 and all that. A tale of two sciences. Philosophical Review, 93, 335–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kitcher, P. (1989). Explanatory unification and the causal structure of the world. In P. Kitcher & W. Salmon (Eds.), Scientific explanation (pp. 410–505). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lange, M. (2009). Laws and lawmakers: Science, metaphysics, and the laws of nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D. K. (1986). Causal explanation. In Philosophical Papers (Vol. 2, pp. 214–40). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Little, D. (1993). On the scope and limits of generalizations in the social sciences. Synthese, 97, 183–207.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald, G. (1985). Modified methodological individualism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 86, 199–211.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald, G. (1992). Reduction and evolutionary biology. In D. Charles & K. Lennon (Eds.), Reduction, explanation and realism (pp. 69–96). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marchionni, C. (2008). Explanatory pluralism and complementarity: From autonomy to integration. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 38, 314–333.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marras, A. (1993). Psychophysical supervenience and nonreductive materialism. Synthese, 95, 275–304.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Owens, D. (1989). Levels of explanation. Mind, 98, 59–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pereboom, D., & Kornblith, H. (1991). The metaphysics of irreducibility. Philosophical Studies, 63, 125–145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Potochnik, A. (2010). Levels of explanation reconceived. Philosophy of Science, 77, 59–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, H. (1967). Psychological predicates. In W. Capitan & D. Merrill (Eds.), Art, mind and religion (pp. 37–48). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cited as reprinted in Putnam (1975b).

    Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, H. (1973). Reductionism and the nature of psychology. Cognition, 2, 131–146. Cited as revised in Putnam (1975c).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, H. (1975a). Mind language and reality: Philosophical papers (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, H. (1975b). The nature of mental states. In Putnam 1975a (pp. 429–441).

  • Putnam, H. (1975c) Philosophy and our mental life. In Putnam 1975a (pp. 291–303).

  • Sawyer, R. K. (2002). Nonreductive individualism: Part I—supervenience and wild disjunction. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 32, 537–559.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shaprio, L., & Sober, E. (2012). Against proportionality. Analysis, 72, 89–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sober, E. (1988). Confirmation and law-likeness. Philosophical Review, 97, 93–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sober, E. (1999). The multiple realizability argument against reductionism. Philosophy of Science, 66, 542–564.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strevens, M. (2008). Depth: An account of scientific explanation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weatherson, B. (2012). Explanation, idealisation and the goldilocks problem. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84, 461–473.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weslake, B. (2010). Explanatory depth. Philosophy of Science, 77, 273–294.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, J. (2003). Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, J., & Hitchcock, C. (2003). Explanatory generalizations, Part I: A counterfactual account. Nous, 37, 1–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yablo, S. (1992). Mental causation. Philosophical Review, 101, 245–280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ylikoski, P., & Kuorikoski, J. (2010). Dissecting explanatory power. Philosophical Studies, 148, 201–219.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Christopher Cowie, Tim Lewens and Nick Shea for their helpful comments on an early draft of the manuscript. This work has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement no 284123.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, UK

    Christopher Clarke

Authors
  1. Christopher Clarke
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christopher Clarke.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Clarke, C. The explanatory virtue of abstracting away from idiosyncratic and messy detail. Philos Stud 173, 1429–1449 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0554-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0554-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation