Explaining Explanation

David-Hillel Ruben

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259916
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This second edition of David-Hillel Ruben's influential and highly acclaimed book on the philosophy of explanation has been revised and expanded, and the author has made substantial changes in light of the extensive reviews the first edition received. Ruben's views on the place of laws in explanation has been refined and clarified. What is perhaps the central thesis of the book, his realist view of explanation, describing the way in which explanation depends on metaphysics, has been updated and extended and engages with some of the work in this area published since the book's first edition.

NOTES

CHAPTER I GETTING OUR BEARINGS

1. Karel Lambert and Gordon G. Brittan Jr., An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, third edition, Ridgeview Publishing Company, Atascadero, 1987, pp. 14–17.

2. Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, Free Press, New York, 1965, pp. 335–336. Subsequent page numbers in my text following discussion of Hempel’s views throughout this book refer to this title, unless otherwise indicated.

3. Michael Friedman, “Explanation and Scientific Understanding,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXXI, 1974, pp. 5–19. Quotation from p. 5.

4. Raimo Tuomela, “Explaining Explaining,” Erkenntnis, vol. 15, 1980, pp. 211–243. Quote from p. 217.

5. Romane Clark and Paul Welsh, Introduction to Logic, Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1962, pp. 153–154. The “destruction at Rotterdam” is their example. Following Clark and Welsh, I construe “process” sufficiently widely to include acts and activities.

6. S. Bromberger, “An Approach to Explanation,” in Analytical Philosophy, second series, ed. R. J. Butler, Blackwell, Oxford, 1965, pp. 72–105. Quotation from p. 104.

7. Peter Achinstein, The Nature of Explanation, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983; see chapters 2 and 3. I have learned a great deal from Achinstein’s writings on explanation, even on issues where I do not in the end agree with what he has to say. Another example of an approach to explanation which makes explanatory acts the conceptually prior concept is to be found in Raimo Tuomela, “Explaining Explaining.”

8. An act of another illocutionary type, to be precise. For the distinction between illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary acts, see J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, second edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984. See especially Lectures VIII and IX, pp. 94–120.

9. Specifically, illocutionary acts.

10. An illocutionary product.

11. Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, p. 412.

12. Ernest Sosa, “The Analysis of ‘Knowledge that P,’” Analysis, vol. 25, new series no. 103, October 1964, p. 1.

13. Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, vol. 23, June 1963, pp. 121–123; and then, by way of selected examples: Michael Clark, “Knowledge and Grounds,” Analysis, vol. 24, no.2, new series no. 98, December 1963, pp. 46–48; John Turk Saunders and Narayan Champawat, “Mr. Clark’s Definition of Knowledge,” Analysis, vol. 25, no. 1, new series no. 103, October 1964, pp. 8–9; Keith Lehrer, “Knowledge, Truth, and Evidence,” Analysis, vol. 25, no. 5, new series no. 107, April 1965, pp. 168–175; and of course Sosa, “The Analysis of ‘Knowledge that P.’”

14. Michael Friedman, “Explanation and Scientific Understanding,” p. 13.

15. See for example Peter Unger, “On Experience and the Development of the Understanding,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 3, 1966, pp. 48–56.

16. Karl Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,” in Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973, pp. 106–152. For quotes, see pp. 108–111.

17. I speak in unorthodox terminology of a concept’s intension (normally, it is words which have intension). I mean by “intension of a concept” merely its model, i.e., the analysis of it.

18. I have always liked the account of this by Stephen Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding, Harper, New York, 1961, and especially his sharp distinction between understanding and foresight (prediction).

19. Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, p. 413.

20. Examples include Peter Achinstein, The Nature of Explanation, pp. 15–73; Arthur Collins, “Explanation and Causality,” Mind, vol. 75, 1966, pp. 482–500.

21. Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, p. 412.

22. Hempel’s famous Deductive-Nomological and Inductive-Statistical models are meant to provide two different sets of requirements for full scientific explanation. I discuss these models fully in Chapter IV. Hempel speaks of a third model, the Deductive-Statistical, but I ignore it here, and elsewhere in the book.

23. Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978, pp. 41–42.

24. David Lewis, “Causal Explanation,” in his Philosophical Papers, vol. II, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1986, pp. 214–240. See especially pp. 217–221 and 226–228.

25. Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, pp. 42–43.

26. A full discussion of this issue would involve careful investigation of the differences between sentences, statements, and propositions, and of the question of which, of the three, logical relations like material implication or strict entailment hold between. But this would take us far off course; let me here assume that it is sentences which entail, etc., other sentences.

27. Almost uncontroversial, since Peter Achinstein’s theory of explanation might controvert it. See my review of his The Nature of Explanation in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 37, 1986, pp. 377–384.

28. Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, p. 336.

29. Wesley, Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, pp. 15–16.

30. I draw the distinctions as I do, because I think they help one to see what is at stake in deciding between different theories of explanation. Of course, there are many other (perhaps more illuminating for different purposes) ways in which to divide up the competing theories. In particular, my typology differs in important ways from a superficially similar one offered by Salmon in Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, pp. 16–18.

31. Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, p. 337.

32. See for example: Brian Skyrms, Choice and Chance, Dickinson Publishing Company, Encino and Belmont, California, 1975, chapters, I, VI, and VII, pp. 200–203; J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability, and Paradox, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973, chapter 5; David Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Part 5; and especially the classical source for the distinction, Rudolf Carnap, “The Two Concepts of Probability,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. V, 1945, pp. 513–532.

33. G. H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding, Routledge, London, 1971, p. 13. Von Wright, not surprisingly, goes on to deny that there are any non-deductive explanations: “It seems to me better … not to say that the inductive-probabilistic model explains what happens, but to say only that it justifies certain expectations and predications” (p. 14). See also Wolfgang Stegmüller, “Two Successor Concepts to the Notion of Statistical Explanation,” in Logic and Philosophy, ed. G. H. von Wright, Nijhoff, The Hague, 1980, pp. 37–52. As far as I know, the best defense of probabilistic explanation is to be found in Colin Howson, “On a Recent Argument for the Impossibility of a Statistical Explanation of Single Events, and a Defence of a Modified Form of Hempel’s Theory of Statistical Explanation,” Erkenntnis, vol. 29, 1988, pp. 113–124.

34. Wesley Salmon, R. Jeffrey, and J. Green Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1971, p. 64.

35. Peter Railton, “A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 45, 1978, pp. 206–26. Quotation from p. 216.

36. Henry Kyburg Jr., “Conjunctivitis,” in Induction, Acceptance, and Rational Beliefs, ed. M. Swain, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1970, pp. 55–82.

37. For example, in Wesley Salmon, Scientifc Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, p. 87, and in his “A Third Dogma of Empiricism,” in Basic Problems in Methodology and Linguistics, ed. R. Butts and J. Hintikka, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1977, pp. 152–153.

38. Colin Howson, “Statistical Explanation,” pp. 122–123.

39. Wesley Salmon et al., Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance, pp. 62–65; Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, p. 46.

40. Salmon’s own exposition seems to use both epistemic and physical probability; I have set out the example, trying to be clear about which probability is involved in the argument.

41. Wesley Salmon, Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance, p. 64.

42. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, London, 1972, pp. 59–60.

43. This claim might be challenged, in view of Peter Railton’s D-N model of probabilistic explanation. I stand by my claim. For Railton, an explanation of why an event e “improbably took place” is the conjunction of a deductive argument whose conclusion is that e had a low probability of occurrence, and “a parenthetic addendum to the effect that” e occurred (“Deductive-Nomological Model,” p. 214). The conjunction of an argument and an addendum is not itself an argument. The conclusion of the argument on its own is not a sentence that asserts that e occurred, and so the argument by itself cannot be an explanation of why e occurred. Rather, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Second Edition
• I Getting our Bearings
• II Plato on Explanation
• III Aristotle on Explanation
• IV Mill and Hempel on Explanation
• V The Ontology of Explanation
• VI Arguments, Laws, and Explanation
• VII A Realist Theory of Explanation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Reviews of the First Edition of Explaining Explanation
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author