A Pragmatic Theory of Explanation

Abstract

Scientific explanations can be approached from the point of view of querying and answering. Thus they can be viewed as social actions with a questioner (the explainee) and an answer-giver (the explainer) as its agents. This social action takes place in a certain scientific social context, as we shall soon see. Our aims below are twofold. First, we shall sketch a pragmatic theory of explanation which we shall later, especially in Chapter 11, use to account for the explanation of social actions, to which it seems to be well suited. Secondly, as a by-product, as it were, we obtain an account of the social action of explaining to illustrate our theory of social action and to complement our previously presented examples of actions. Thus, while a presentation of a theory of scientific explanation may be felt to be somewhat out of place here, we think that the mentioned two reasons do justify our brief excursion to the field of the theory of explanation.