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Scientific Explanation Scientific Explanation Michael Strevens For the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition The three cardinal aims of science are prediction, control, and expla- nation; but the greatest of these is explanation. Also the most inscrutable: prediction aims at truth, and control at happiness, and insofar as we have some independent grasp of these notions, we can evaluate science’s strate- gies of prediction and control from the outside. Explanation, by contrast, aims at scientific understanding, a good intrinsic to science and therefore something that it seems we can only look to science itself to explicate. Philosophers have wondered whether science might be better off aban- doning the pursuit of explanation. Duhem (1954), among others, argued that explanatory knowledge would have to be a kind of knowledge so ex- alted as to be forever beyond the reach of ordinary scientific inquiry: it would have to be knowledge of the essential natures of things, something that neo-Kantians, empiricists, and practical men of science could all agree was neither possible nor perhaps even desirable. Everything changed when Hempel formulated his dn account of ex- planation. In accordance with the observation above, that our only clue to the nature of explanatory knowledge is science’s own explanatory prac- tice, Hempel proposed simply to describe what kind of things scientists ten- dered when they claimed to have an explanation, without asking whether such things were capable of providing “true understanding”. Since Hempel, the philosophy of scientific explanation has proceeded in this humble vein, 1 seeming more like a sociology of scientific practice than an inquiry into a set of transcendent norms. In keeping with its mission as a branch of philos- ophy, however, the study of explanation pursues a particular kind of socio- logical knowledge: it is concerned almost exclusively with the ideal at which scientists take themselves to be aiming, and barely at all with the steps and missteps taken on the way to realizing the ideal. As Hempel saw it, scientific explanation was of a piece with prediction, requiring the same resources and giving a similar kind of satisfaction. No doubt this modest view of the explanatory enterprise played a part in making the study of explanation acceptable in the climate of post-war empiricism. The story of explanation in recent decades, however, is an expansionist one. Over the years, philosophers of explanation have gradually required more resources for, and made grander claims for the significance of, explanation’s role in science. (For a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of expla- nation from 1948 to 1988, with a full bibliography, see Salmon (1990).) The DN Account Hempel’s deductive-nomological, or dn account (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948), is intended to capture the form of any determinis- tic scientific explanation of an individual event, such as the expansion of a particular metal bar when heated, the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the outbreak of the American Civil War. According to Hempel, such an explanation is always a deductive deriva- tion of the occurrence of the event to be explained from a set of true propo- sitions including at least one statement of a scientific law. (The event to be explained is called the explanandum; the set of explaining statements is sometimes called the explanans.) In other words, a deterministic event explanation is always a sound, law-involving, deductive argument with the conclusion that the explanandum event occurred. Intuitively, the premises of a dn explanation spell out the relevant initial, background, and other boundary conditions, together with the laws govern- ing the behavior of the system in which the explanandum occurred. Hempel 2 cites the following argument, for example, as a typical dn explanation of the event of a thermometer’s mercury expanding when placed in hot water: The (cool) sample of mercury was placed in hot water, heating it, Mercury expands when heated, thus The sample of mercury expanded. Because the law or laws that must be cited in a dn explanation typically “cover” the pattern of behavior of which the explanandum is an instance, the dn account is sometimes referred to as the covering law account of expla- nation. You will see that the dn account is not intended to give the form of probabilistic event explanations; Hempel offers a separate account of prob- abilistic explanation, to be discussed below. The explanation of phenomena other than events is, by contrast, apparently amenable to the dn approach. Hempel suggests that a scientific law can be explained, for example, much like an event, by deducing it from premises including at least one other law. However, he finds himself unable to make good on this proposal, for reasons connected to the relevance problem discussed in the next section. Many scientific explanations of events and other phenomena undoubt- edly have the form proposed by the dn account: they are logical derivations from laws and other information. Hempel does not entirely satisfy himself, however, with answering questions of form. Taking one step beyond soci- ological humility, he advances a thesis as to why deductive, law-involving arguments should confer understanding: [A dn explanation] shows that, given the particular circum- stances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenom- enon was to be expected; and it is in this sense that the explana- tion enables us to understand why the phenomenon occurred (Hempel 1965a, 337). 3 Scientific understanding, then, takes the form of retrospective expectation: you might say (loosely) that, whereas prediction is concerned with what we should expect in the future, explanation is concerned with what we should have expected in the past. Explanation is, then, put on a par with predic- tion, and so made safe for empiricist philosophy of science. Hempel even goes so far as to say that the difference between explanation and prediction is merely pragmatic (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948, 249), though the dn account does not in itself entail such a thesis. Objections to the DN Account Three kinds of objections to the dn ac- count have been especially important for the subsequent development of the philosophy of explanation. The first kind of objection, developed by Kyburg, Salmon, and others, points to the dn theory’s inability to account for judgments of explanatory relevance. The paradigm is the following argument, which satisfies all of the dn account’s criteria for a good explanation of the event of a particular teaspoon of salt’s dissolving: The teaspoon of salt was hexed (meaning that certain hand ges- tures were made over the salt), The salt was placed in water, All hexed salt dissolves when placed in water, thus The salt dissolved. The explanation appears to attribute the salt’s dissolving in part to its being hexed, when in fact the hexing is irrelevant. There are various responses to the counter-example that aim to preserve as much of the dn account as possible, for example, holding that the gen- eralization about hexed salt is not a true law, or imposing the requirement that a dn explanation use the most general law available. Salmon’s much less conservative reaction is to conclude that Hempel is wrong to think of explanation in terms of expectability, therefore of expla- nations as kinds of argument. The relation between the factors cited in an 4 explanation and the explanandum itself, Salmon holds, is not epistemic, but ontic; it should be a physical relevance relation—a relation of statistical rel- evance, he first proposes (Salmon 1970), or a relation of causal relevance, as he later comes to believe (Salmon 1984). The faulty explanation of the salt’s dissolving is to be discarded, argues Salmon, not because of some formal or logical defect, but because it cites an event, the hexing of the salt, that fails to bear the appropriate relevance relation to the explanandum. Hempel himself declines (early in his career, at least) to give a dn account of the explanation of laws because of a related problem. Kepler’s laws may be derived from a single “law” that is simply the conjunction of Kepler’s laws and Boyle’s law. Such a derivation is clearly no explanation of Kepler’s laws, writes Hempel, yet it satisfies the dn account’s requirements: the premises are true, the argument valid and law-involving (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948, 273n33). The second important objection to the dn account is perhaps also the most famous: it shows, most philosophers would agree, that the dn account pays insufficient attention to the explanatory role of causal relations. The height of a flagpole can be cited, along with the position of the sun and the law that light travels in straight lines, to explain the length of the flag- pole’s shadow. The dn account is well able to make sense of this explanation: it can be cast in the form of a sound, law-involving argument. But now take this same argument and switch the premise stating the height of the flagpole with the premise stating the length of the shadow. You now have a sound, law-involving argument for the height of the flagpole that cites, among other things, the length of the shadow—thus, according to the dn account, you have an explanation of the height of the flagpole that cites, as in explainer, the length of the shadow. This consequence of the dn account—that the height of a flagpole can be explained by the length of its shadow—seems ob- viously wrong, and it is wrong, it seems, because a cause cannot be explained by its own effects. 5 A further famous example strongly suggests that effects can only be ex- plained by their causes, together with the laws and background conditions in virtue of which they are causes.
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