Functional explaining: a new approach to the philosophy of explanation

tags

Explanation

Notes

Explaining is something most people seem to have an intuitive grip on

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advances in the philosophy of understanding have recently made it possible to articulate an illuminating account of explanation in terms of understanding.

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the interesting philosophy is then in investigating the nature of understanding.

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something is an explanation if and only if it is possible for it to be the content of an explaining-act for some cognizer

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vagueness infects such a definition: does a proof with 10^10,000,000,000 steps, which could be used only in an explaining-act among gods, count as an explanation?

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FE (Functional Explaining): Explainer B explains (engages in an explaining-act with respect to) proposition p to audience A if and only if B produces a repre- sentation R that, when properly internalized, causes improved understanding of p in A (where the content of that understanding is similar to R), and B intends to explain10 or cause understanding via this production.

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FE treats the vehicle of explanations—that by which the explainer creates understanding—as representations

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the theory of understanding I favor (see Sect. 6) treats understanding as the possession of a particularly robust kind of representation.

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admittedly unsatisfying demand that explanations cause understanding “when properly internalized”

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one utters a magical incan- tation that causes the audience to suddenly develop all the brain structures upon which improved understanding of some proposition p supervene. This does not seem to be an act of explaining

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The important constraint on the factiveness of explanations17 comes not from FE itself, but from the connected account of understanding.

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one only understands when one can successfully (and non- accidentally) produce certain results

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This cognitive sense of understanding could roughly be characterized as understanding-why or understanding- how, in opposition to mere understanding-that.

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understanding involves possession of an appropriate model of the understood.

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discovery of the very same facts can cause understanding in one person but not another—to that extent, understanding is subject-sensitive

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this propensity to cause understanding is not just a useful diagnostic criterion, but actually constitutive of what an explanation is.

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articulating a notion of understanding that is both independently plausible and predicts the right results for evaluating cases of putative explaining-acts.

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understanding is best characterized by what it enables one to do.

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the problem that whether one can perform depends in part on whether the world cooperates.

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What dif- ferentiates real understanders from non-understanders is how they think about the understood—what sort of picture they have it, or (more perspicuously) what sort of representation they possess.

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understanding is a function of having the right sort of picture of the understood

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one understands in virtue of representing the understood object, but which representations suffice for understanding is determined by what one can do with those representations in contextually relevant counterfactuals.

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URM (Understanding as Representation Manipulability): A statement, attributed in context C, that thinker T understands object o, is true if and only if T possesses a mental representation R of o that T could (in counterfactuals salient in C) modify in small ways to produce R , where R is a representation of o and possession of R enables efficacious (according to standards relevant in C) inferences pertaining to, or manipulations, of o.

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explaining acts are measured by how good a picture they present of the explained object, where the quality of the picture is measured by what it empowers us to infer and do.

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