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What Makes an Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Rollin W. Workman
Rollin W. Workman*
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
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Abstract

Newtonian theory has usually been accepted as a paradigm example of an explanation. There are two widely known analyses of what makes it so. According to one analysis, the deductive and predictive nature of the theory is what counts. The second analysis emphasizes the ability of the theory to connect widely different events and laws. The present paper proposes a third analysis stressing three characteristics. (1) The explanation includes a description which is in part of something unobserved. (2) The description is true in the sense of corresponding to the facts. (3) Through the description, the explanation confers “naturalness” upon the thing explained.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 1964, pp. 241 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 by Philosophy of Science Association

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References

1 It might also be called the colligational analysis, to use a term borrowed from John Yolton who borrowed it from Watkins. Cf. John Yolton's Thinking and Perceiving; Open Court, Lasalle, Illinois, 1962; pp. 133, 134.

2 Michael Scriven, “Explanations, Predictions, and Laws”, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III Scientific Explanation, Space and Time, ed. by Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell; University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1962; pp. 224-225.

3 John Wisdom, Proof and Explanation, Unpublished Lectures Delivered in the University of Virginia, Spring, 1957; pp. 81, 82.

4 Scientific American, November, 1960; p. 139.

5 A much better counterexample from physics to the identification of naturalness with familiarity is the Coriolus acceleration which explains the westerly movement of the tradewinds and the easterly drift of the Gulf Stream. The Coriolus force is an abstruse consequence of Newtonian mechanics. Hence it is more readily accepted than relativity as natural by non-physicists even though most people have never heard of it.

6 The name is Stephen Toulmin's. See his Forecast and Understanding; Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1962. I may be extending the term somewhat beyond Toulmin's usage.

7 “Two Non-Logical Uses of the Principle of Induction”, Philosophical Studies, XIII (Jan-Feb, 1962), pp. 27-32.

8 Frank J. Collingwood, “Is ‘Physical Knowledge’ Limited by Its Quantitative Approach to Reality?”; The Nature of Physical Reality, L. W. Friedrich, ed.; Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1960; p. 43.

9 Lewis White Beck, “Constructions and Inferred Entities”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 17 (1950), p. 82.