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Explaining Explanation Explaining Explanation David-Hillel Ruben offers a discussion of some of the main historical attempts to explain the concept of explanation, examining the works of Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Carl Hempel. Building on and developing the insights of these historical figures, he introduces an elaboration and defense of his own solution. In this volume, Ruben relates the concept of explanation to both epistemological and metaphysical issues. Not content to confine the concept to the realm of philosophy of science, he examines it within a far more broadly conceived theory of knowledge. He concludes with his own original and challenging explanation of explanation. Explaining Explanation will be read with interest by students of general philosophy as well as those specializing in the philosophy of science and scholars with a more advanced level of interest. The Problems of Philosophy Their Past and Present General Editor: Ted Honderich Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic University College, London Each book in this series is written to bring into view and to deal with a great or significant problem of philosophy. The books are intended to be accessible to undergraduates in philosophy, and to other readers, and to advance the subject, making a contribution to it. The first part of each book presents the history of the problem in question, in some cases its recent past. The second part, of a contemporary and analytic kind, defends and elaborates the author’s preferred solution. Private Ownership James O.Grunebaum Religious Belief and the Will Louis P.Pojman *Rationality Harold J.Brown *The Rational Foundations of Ethics T.L.S.Sprigge *Moral Knowledge Alan Goldman *Mind-Body Identity Theories Cynthia Macdonald *Practical Reasoning Robert Audi *Personal Identity Harold W.Noonan *The Infinite A.W.Moore *Thought and Language Julius Moravcsik Human Consciousness Alastair Hannay *Explaining Explanation David-Hillel Ruben The Nature of Art A.L.Cothey The Implications of Determinism Roy Weatherford Weakness of the Will Justin Gosling Knowledge of the External World Bruce Aune If P, Then Q: Conditionals and the foundations of reasoning David H.Sanford Political Freedom George G.Brenkert *Scepticism Christopher Hookway Knowledge and Belief Frederick F.Schmitt The Existence of the World Reinhardt Grossman Naming and Reference: From word to object R.J.Nelson *Also available in paperback Explaining Explanation David-Hillel Ruben Senior Lecturer in Philosophy The London School of Economics and Political Science London and New York First published 1990 by Routledge This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. First published in paperback in 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1990, 1992 David-Hillel Ruben All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ruben, David-Hillel. Explaining explanation.—(The problems of philosophy) 1. Explanation I. Title II. Series 160 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data also available ISBN 0-203-16930-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-26475-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-08765-1 (Print Edition) For my parents Blair S. Ruben Sylvia Ginsberg Ruben Hear, my son, the instruction of thy father, And forsake not the teaching of thy mother Contents Preface and Acknowledgements ix I Getting our Bearings 1 Some explanations 3 Process and product 6 The methodology of explaining explanation 9 Restricting the scope of the analysis 15 Scientific and ordinary explanation 16 Partial and full explanation 19 Bad explanations and no explanations 21 Some terminology 23 Theories of explanation 25 Dispensing with contrastives 39 II Plato on Explanation 45 The Phaedo 47 Platonic explanantia and explananda 51 Problems for the physical explainers 53 Some terminology 56 Plato’s Principles 58 Plato’s (PP2) 64 Plato’s (PP1) 66 The Theaetetus 72 Summary 75 III Aristotle on Explanation 77 The doctrine of the four causes 77 Does Aristotle have a general account of explanation? 83 Incidental and per se causes 87 Necessitation and laws in explanation 93 Aristotle on scientific explanation 95 Aristotle’s demonstrations 101 Summary 108 vii Explaining Explanation IV Mill and Hempel on Explanation 110 Mill’s account: laws of coexistence and succession 115 Mill’s account: the symmetry thesis 123 Mill on ultimate explanations 125 Mill on deduction and explanation 129 Hempel’s account of scientific explanation 138 Hempel’s methodology 141 Hempel on the symmetry thesis 145 Hempel on inductive-statistical explanation 149 Hempel on epistemic ambiguity 152 Summary 154 V The Ontology of Explanation 155 Explanation and epistemology 155 Extensionality and the slingshot 156 The relata of the explanation relation 160 Explaining facts 168 The non-extensionality of facts 171 Facts: worldly or wordy? 172 The co-typical predicate extensionality of facts 173 The name transparency of facts 177 VI Arguments, Laws, and Explanation 181 The standard counterexamples: irrelevance 183 The standard counterexamples: symmetry 191 A proposed cure and its problems: the causal condition 192 Generalizations get their revenge 205 VII A Realist Theory of Explanation 209 Are all singular explanations causal explanations? 211 What would make an explanation non-causal? 217 Identity and explanation 218 Are there other non-causal singular explanations? 222 Disposition explanations 225 Again: determinative, high and low dependency explanations 230 Notes 234 Bibliography 256 Name Index 262 Subject Index 264 viii Preface and Acknowledgements This book is written in the conviction that the concept of explanation should not be exclusively hijacked by the philosophy of the natural sciences. As I repeat often in the following, like knowledge, explanation is an epistemic concept, and therefore has a philosophical location within the theory of knowledge, widely conceived. The philosophy of science has great relevance for a theory of explanation, just as it does for discussions of knowledge. But it is not the sole proprietor of either concept. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many debts I have incurred in the writing of this book. A Nuffield Foundation Fellowship for the period of January-April 1988, and a grant from the Suntory-Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines which funded a period of leave from January to April 1989, were both invaluable in providing me with time to write the book. I am extremely grateful for their help, and wish to thank them publicly for it. In addition to funding leave, both also provided me with a small sum of money for the purchase of books, which I found immensely helpful in ensuring that I had all that I needed to work and write efficiently. My intellectual debts are many. Peter Milne read ancestors of chapters II and V, and generously helped me with some of the more technical parts of chapter II. Jonathan Barnes read and commented on an ancestor of chapter III. Graham Macdonald and Mark Sainsbury commented on, and made many helpful suggestions for the improvement of, early versions of chapters I and V. Peter Lipton provided me with many fruitful discussions of explanation generally, and also commented in detail on chapters I, IV, V, and VI. Gary Clarke and Paul Noordhof read over the whole manuscript in an almost final form; both made many useful suggestions throughout the manuscript, and saved me from numerous errors. It would, perhaps, ix Explaining Explanation not be inappropriate in a paragraph on intellectual debts to mention my deep respect for the literature I discuss (even when I argue with it), and the extent to which I have learned and profited from it. This is obvious in the case of the historical figures, but, obvious or not, it is similarly the case with the contemporary literature on explanation which I cite (and some which I do not have space or time to cite). Whatever I have been able to discern has only been by standing on their shoulders. I have learned a great deal from everything I have read, but perhaps the greatest single influence on my thinking has been the work of Peter Achinstein. It is so self-evident that only the writer himself can be responsible for any remaining mistakes and errors, that writers often attempt to discover increasingly novel or amusing ways in which to say this. I shall not try; I know that the philosophical influence of all these people made the. book much better than it would otherwise have been, and it cannot be the fault of any of them that they were unable to detect all of the errors I made, or unable to ensure that I was capable of making good every error they pointed out to me. In each of my previously published books and articles, I have thanked Mark Sainsbury for philosophical conversation, which—all too often— has been one-sided, with him as teacher and me as pupil. I, like most philosophers, cannot work without constant philosophical discussion, and I have him principally to thank for bringing it about that I live in a philosophically acceptable environment. The strategy of the book is almost, but not quite, straightforward. In the historical portion of the book, chapters II, III, and IV, I discuss the theories of explanation of Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Carl Hempel. Although there is little explicit philosophical work on explanation between Aristotle and Mill—a gap of over two thousand years—there is much implicit in the writings of Bacon, Berkeley, and many other philosophers that is relevant to explanation, but which considerations of space have forced me to neglect.
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