The Nature of Scientific Thinking Also by Jan Faye

AFTER POSTMODERNISM NIELS BOHR: HIS HERITAGE AND LEGACY RETHINKING SCIENCE THE REALITY OF THE FUTURE The Nature of Scientific Thinking On Interpretation, Explanation, and Understanding

Jan Faye Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, , Denmark

ISBN 978-1-137-38982-4 ISBN 978-1-137-38983-1 (eBook) DOI 10.105 7/9781137389831 © Jan Faye 2014 Reprint of the original edition 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-137-38982-4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements vii

1 Forms of Understanding 1 1 A subjective feature of explanation 2 2 The unification view 4 3 The causal-mechanical view 12 4 The visualization view 15 2 Understanding as Organized Beliefs 24 1 The content view 26 2 Skills and intelligibility 34 3 The organization view 37 4 Embodied and embedded understanding 41 5 Levels of understanding 48 6 Norms of understanding? 51 7 Cognitive schemata 56 3 On Interpretation 60 1 Two notions of interpretation 60 2 Interpretations in the natural sciences 64 3 Roads to interpretation 68 4 Interpretation and the discovery of scientific hypothesis 75 5 Interpretation and the construction of scientific concepts 79 4 Representations 85 1 What is a representation? 87 2 Representing and understanding 91 3 What do laws represent? 99 4 The linguistic approach to theories 103 5 Models as focal points of scientific explanation 108 5 Scientific Explanation 114 1 Nomic explanations 117 2 The Hempelian view 122 3 The received criticism 125 6 Causal Explanations 136 1 From embodiment to modal reflections 137 2 Causal explanation as reflective understanding 142

v vi Contents

3 Causation in 147 4 Causation in biology 149 5 Causal beliefs about causal facts 154 6 Context-dependent relations and context-dependent descriptions 157 7 Other Types of Explanations 162 1 Types of explanations 163 2 Structural explanations 168 3 Functional explanations or evolutionary explanations? 171 8 The Pragmatics of Explanation 183 1 Why is explanation a matter of pragmatics? 186 2 The contrastive dimension of why-questions 193 3 van Fraassen on explanation 195 4 Critiques of van Fraassen 203 9 Not Just Why-questions 210 1 Why-questions in science 213 2 The paradigm argument 216 3 The relation argument 220 4 The reason argument 225 5 The translation argument 231 6 The contrast-class argument 234 7 The relevance argument 237 10 A Rhetorical Approach to Explanation 241 1 The problem context 241 2 Individual cognitive interests 245 3 Explanation as speech act 248 4 Explanation as a rhetorical means of communication 251 5 The rhetorical situation 255 6 Explanatory relevance 259 7 Explanatory force 262 11 Pluralism and the Unity of Science 270 1 The epistemological issue 272 2 The methodological issue 276 3 The ontological issue 279 4 Conclusion 284

Notes 289 Literature 316 Index 327 Preface and Acknowledgements

This is a book about the epistemology of science. It attempts to account for the scientific aim of understanding nature on the basis of a natural- ized and pragmatic approach to the of science. My main purpose is to describe how our human cognitive capacities allow scien- tists to acquire an understanding of nature by means of representation, interpretation, and explanation. This means that this is not a book about the methodology of science focusing on certainty and the justification of scientific belief. These issues have dominated for a very long period of time since the logical positivists set up theo- ries of confirmation and Popper concocted theories of verisimilitude or corroboration. I agree with the American philosopher Linda Zagzebski who remarks: “the concept of justification is associated both historically and conceptually with the perceived danger of scepticism.”1 The success of science proves more than anything that scepticism is a delusion of our philosophical imagination, which Descartes forcefully persuaded us to accept as a permanent challenge for any epistemic inquiry. It’s time to leave this delusion behind. After Darwin I think it is correct to adopt the naturalistic standpoint that the capacity of humans to present the world perceptually is a product of evolution and due to our adapting to our external environment.2 Even though countering scepticism no longer rules the game within the profession of philosophy of science, there are many unsolved prob- lems associated with the exact relation between nature, on the one hand, and the scientists’ representing, understanding, and explaining nature, on the other. My purpose is to show not only that understanding shapes explanation but also that explanation provides understanding. I regard ‘intention’ and ‘understanding’ as central categories in a naturalized account of explanation, interpretation, and representation. A concept like ‘intention’ gives us the opportunity to see explanation, interpre- tation, and representation as having an empirical content in virtue of being the result of human intention and constituting important parts of scientific communication. In this light, an explanation is an intended report of the explainer’s understanding. First and foremost I argue that understanding is distinct from knowl- edge . In some situations it seems right to say that a person understands something without possessing knowledge. For example, there are

vii viii Preface and Acknowledgements situations where an explanation arises from understanding, but where this pre-existing understanding later turns out to be based on factually false beliefs, or those situations where it is impossible to prove that the pre-existing understanding is correct or incorrect. Think of explanations provided by past, now discarded scientific theories, or think of religious or philosophical explanations that are impossible to test empirically. In those cases, what justifies the explanation seems to be the under- standing which shapes the explanation. But just as an explanation may be false, the understanding on which it builds may be inadequate. This brings me to another long-lived philosophical dispute between the Platonist and the Aristotelian views of human understanding. Reviewing the huge literature on explanation, one realizes that most is inspired by the Platonist dream of a mind-independent understanding of the world. According to this epistemological orientation, real under- standing requires apprehending true propositions; it does not concern people’s beliefs in them. Explanation yielding such an understanding is not man-made, but the objective result of scientific activity. Platonists consider ‘understanding’ to be the product of relating true proposi- tions together such that ideally they fit into a unified deductive system. Although Platonists may admit that there is indeed a worldly pragmatic side of explanation, they insist that it can be ignored because it does not contribute to the God’s eye view. In contrast, the Aristotelian view sees human comprehension as internal rather than external to the natural world. Understanding is mind-dependent, even though it may concern objective matters. It is mind-dependent because it involves people’s actual beliefs and their relations and organization. Therefore expla- nation that expresses people’s understanding depends both on their mental resources as well as on the object of their understanding. So the explanatory product is as much a result of human explanatory activity as of the facts themselves. According to the Aristotelians, pragmatics of explanation should not be disregarded because it is essential for under- standing of explanations in everyday life as well as in scientific practice. This book stands by the Aristotelian view. I propose that in its origin, understanding is a neuro-biological way of organizing our everyday beliefs. But when we are dealing with cogni- tively advanced levels of reflection, as we are in science, the organi- zation of our beliefs is enhanced by the use of theories and models. However, theories and models help us produce explanations that can be justified by observation and experiment. My thesis is that an explana- tion is an answer to an explanation-seeking question, and as such I see explanation as part of a rhetorical practice of communication, the function Preface and Acknowledgements ix of which is to convey information and understanding. An interpreta- tion helps the interpreter to gain understanding, whereas an explana- tion expresses the explainer’s understanding and communicates it to the explainee, thereby providing understanding to her. In short, this book proposes a theory in which explanation, interpretation, representation, and understanding, are connected by considering “interpretation” in one sense of the term as the construction of a representation and by regarding it in another sense as a kind of explanation. From the perspective of interpersonal communication, a theory of explanation should not be normative in the sense of holding that an answer must fulfil certain logical or ontological constraints to be considered an explanation. Thus, I neither stipulate the sorts of formal conditions associated with the approach of Carl Hempel and those who have followed his lead, nor demand causal connections as neces- sary for acceptable scientific explanations as has been maintained since Aristotle. Whether an explanation must fulfil certain norms for being considered ‘satisfactory’ in science (or in any other areas where people produce explanation) is contingent on the situation in which the utter- ance of the explanation acts as a response to an explanation-seeking question. As long as an answer is a response to an explanation-seeking question and provides the questioner (and others) with understanding, it necessarily – ipso facto – functions as an explanation. I shall argue that what characterizes a pragmatic view of explanation, in contrast to other views, is that a pragmatic approach primarily focuses on the context in which the explanation-seeking question is asked and the functional role of the answer in terms of providing understanding for the questioner . In short, a pragmatic approach attempts to give a descriptive analysis of explana- tion as a human, linguistic activity rather than a prescriptive defini- tion of the sort given by the deductive-nomological model or the causal accounts. In this sense, what follows is thoroughly descriptive in intent and makes no pretence of providing a normative ideal for evaluating better or worse acts of explaining or instances of understanding. Others before me have defended a pragmatic theory of explanation, most notably in recent times, Bas van Fraassen. In Chapter 8 I discuss his approach at certain length. On the one hand, I believe van Fraassen has gone astray in his account of explanation by failing to include – in a logi- cally necessary way – the intentions of the explainer or the explainee. On the other hand, Peter Achinstein recognizes the importance of inten- tions, but I find that he misses an important point by demanding that an answer must be true to count as an explanation. In Chapter 10 I take a look at his approach and characterize the main difference between his x Preface and Acknowledgements view, which sees explanation as an illocutionary speech act, and my own, which sees it as a perlocutionary speech act. This latter view fits with my pragmatic-rhetorical approach to explanation. The outline of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 presents a summary of how philosophers of science have regarded the topic of understanding, and its connection with explanation, in the light of earlier philosophical claims. Chapter 2 presents my view that understanding is a question of the organization of a belief system and contrasts it with what I call the “content view” and the “ability view.” I also propose that under- standing comes in two variants: embodied understanding, which we share with other animals, and reflective understanding, which can be associated with interpretation, explanation, and other forms of theo- retical representation. Chapter 3 focuses on interpretation in science. I argue that inter- pretation is concerned with understanding meaning and that it arises whenever we face a representational problem. Interpretation comes in two versions. In one we explain an already given meaning, and in the other we try to construct the meaning of something that has not yet been understood to our satisfaction. This leads us to Chapter 4, which is devoted to our concept of representation and to how theoretical constructions, like scientific models and theories, are used to express and produce scientific explanations. The main idea is that neither theo- ries nor models are true or false by themselves. What may be true or false are the explanations that they enable us to produce. I argue that theo- ries are nothing but linguistic rules which scientists use to describe the structures of idealized scientific models, which are abstract or concrete representations that may be good or bad, precise or imprecise. Based on these models scientists may produce hypotheses by which they explain concrete phenomena, and these are either true or false. For a long time Hempel’s ‘covering law’ or ‘deductive-nomological’ model of explanation was the received view of explanation. The main reason why it failed was because it regards one type of explanation, namely nomic explanation, as defining the form of all scientific explanations. As long as Hempel’s model is confined to that subset of explanations expressed in terms of laws, and no pragmatic aspects of explanation are ignored, it may still give us a fair analysis of what an ideal nomic explanation might be. In Chapter 5 I deal with nomothetic explana- tions focusing on Hempel’s covering law model and its requirement of deductive subsumption under a ‘law’ statement. To this extent I agree with Hempel’s view that nomic explanations need not be causal expla- nations, but apart from this special (but very important) case of nomic Preface and Acknowledgements xi explanations, I disagree with Hempel’s logical way of seeing explanation as context-free, and I reject the view that this model covers all forms of scientific explanations. As an alternative to Hempel’s logical-formalist approach, in Chapter 6 I show how causal explanations are context-sensitive and that explaining something causally requires describing it from a certain standpoint. We never just explain something; we always do it from a particular perspec- tive, focusing on some features and ignoring others. An explanation is always about something; it is never of something. Whether an explana- tion is good or bad depends on the interests and background knowledge of those evaluating the proposed explanation. If this is correct, it also means that the ontic view of causation, the view according to which causes explain their effects in virtue of a causal relation between them, is mistaken since causation takes place regardless of the explainer’s inter- ests and background knowledge. Rather, people offer causal explana- tions, and no fact explains other facts alone by itself. Explanation is one of the most debated concepts in philosophy of science; yet, there is little consensus among specialists on how to char- acterize it. Three main approaches appear to be alive today: the formal- logical view, the ontic view, and the pragmatic view. Among these classes of philosophical theories there is little hope for agreement. In his review of the many rival models of explanation, Newton-Smith acknowledges that each provides insight into a different aspect of explanation, but he also claims that the lack of a deeper unifying theory is “an embarrass- ment for the philosophy of science.”3 There seems to be little common ground beyond the expectation that explanation is meant to provide understanding by providing some particular information about factual matters. The pragmatic view, however, has at least one advantage over the others, because this approach does not deny that the other concep- tions of explanation aim at real and actual goals of scientific explana- tion, insofar as the explanatory context may make it appropriate and fruitful to pursue some of these goals. But pragmatists will deny both that the alternative models really define what scientific explanation is and that they can cope with all possible forms of scientific explana- tion. Rather their conclusion is that there are many different types of explanations, inside and outside science, depending on our particular cognitive interests. The hunt for the essence (so to speak) of ‘scientific explanation’ is a philosopher’s error. Chapter 7 presents some of these other types of explanations with a focus on structural and functional explanations. It argues that even though causal understanding of the world underlies these forms of explanation, they are not reducible to xii Preface and Acknowledgements causal explanation because they communicate information that fulfils different cognitive interests than purely causal information. All theories of explanation must address these distinct features of explanation. As we shall see, philosophers who regard explanation as a logical argument also think that scientific explanations are distinct from everyday explanations. In contrast, philosophers who regard explana- tion as a communicative act think that everyday explanations and scientific explanations are not in principle different in kind. The differ- ence between them lies in the emphasis that scientists put on rigour and generality. Other philosophers, like van Fraassen, hold that scientific explanations are responses to why-questions, and only to why-questions. In Chapter 9 I argue that responses to other sorts of questions such as how-questions and what-questions can also provide us with explana- tions as long as these responses convey the desired understanding. A question of any syntactic form can function as an explanation-seeking question in a given context if answering it requires that the explainer relates the topic of the question with some other information. Of course we want our explanations to be true. But as mentioned above, an explanation need not be true to count as an explanation; even a false explanation may still be explanatory. To count as good (in contrast to true) an explanation must be informative, relevant, and convincing. A good explanation has to meet certain standards depending on the context defined by the topic of explanation, the background assump- tions, and the communal and personal interests. Chapter 10 claims that rhetoric offers the best pragmatic approach to understand explanations considered as expedient responses to explanation-seeking questions. Here I introduce the notion of the explanatory situation, a notion that draws on Lloyd F. Bitzer’s concept of the rhetorical situation. In Chapter 11 I conclude by discussing pluralism in science. My pragmatic approach to explanation and understanding underscores pragmatic pluralism and perspectivism. However, because of the natu- ralization of human cognition I still believe that the positivistic ‘unity of science’ movement carried some valuable insight, though it held that this unity lies in the use of an observational language. As belonging to Homo sapiens , humans are formed by their biological evolution. Therefore, it seems natural to think that basic epistemic methodology is a result of this adaptive selection; it is ingrained in our neurons and manifested as ‘cognitive schemas’ which determine the acquisition of knowledge. This basic capacity reappears in practice while we are doing science, including the social and human sciences, and becomes formulated as methodological principles whenever we deliberate about Preface and Acknowledgements xiii scientific practice. Thus, like the positivists of old, I see methodology as the unifying principle in all sciences, but unlike them I ground the unity of that method not in the alleged common use of an observational vocabulary, but in the presupposition that we Homo sapiens all share common cognitive capacities shaped by natural selection. Some of the ideas, which I will defend and develop here, have been presented in a couple of papers: “Explanation Explained” in Synthese 120, 1999, 61–75; “The Pragmatic-Rhetorical Theory of Explanation” in J. Persson & P. Ylikoski (eds) Rethinking Explanation. Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol. 252. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag 2007, 43–68, and “Interpretation in the Natural Sciences” which appeared in M. Dorato, M. Redei, M. & Suarez (eds) EPSA07, Proceedings of the First Conference of the European Society of Philosophy of Science, Springer 2009, but most of the ideas and arguments have not been introduced before. When I met my wife, Lisa Storm Villadsen, a rhetorician, it was at a time when I also became interested in the problems of explanation. Her lasting impact on me had not only consequences for my personal life but also for my views on explanation and interpretation. I realized that there was a strong rhetorical dimension connected to scientific explana- tion, which I recognized was of epistemic importance and had been rela- tively ignored by most philosophy of science. Here I wish to present her with my heartfelt thanks for the love she has given me in so many ways. As a result of my gratitude, I want to dedicate this new book to her. Since then I have been working with explanation and interpretation in the context of both the humanistic sciences and the natural sciences, and I have had the luck to discuss problems concerning explanation and interpretation with many colleagues and students. In particular, I want to thank Alexander Bird, Finn Collin, Henk de Regt, Dennis Dieks, Olav Gjelsvik, Sara Green, Bengt Hansson, Michael M. Karlsson, Johannes Persson, Stathis Psillos, Matti Sintonen, Rebecca Schweder, Erik Weber, Petri Ylikoski, Eugen Zeleňák, and my students Thomas Basbøll, Jacob Birk Olsen, and Mads Sørensen. At one time or another we have discussed our common interest in understanding explanation. Ylikoski, Zeleňák, and Green have also given important comments on parts of the manuscript. I also wish to thank Mark Tschaepe for exchanging ideas of common interest concerning pragmatic theories of explanation. But I owe one person more thanks than anybody else. The generosity of my colleague and long-time friend Henry Folse has once again been immense as he took the time to polish my English and to make an over- whelming number of valuable comments. The benefit of his unselfish- ness is tremendous. xiv Preface and Acknowledgements

Notes

1 . Zagzebski (2001), p. 239. 2 . Writing about Roy Wood Sellars’ evolutionary , Pouwel Slurink (1996) states the realist position behind Darwinism head on: “There has to be a reality outside the organism if the concept of adaptation is to make any sense, and the capacity for knowledge and even for science enables certain organisms to adapt themselves to their cosmic environment.” 3 . Newton-Smith (2000), p. 132.