I’ve been giving some thought to explanations lately. As a teacher and as the parent of a five-year-old, I spend a lot of time explaining things, and I’ve been wondering a bit about what makes a good explanation. I’m talking here about explaining why things happen the way they do – explaining what the heck Descartes means in contemporary English is a whole other ball of wax. And it strikes me that if we’re trying to give a full explanation of why Event A occurs, what we’re trying to do is identify a set of conditions X, Y and Z. And if the explanation is a full one, then whenever you have conditions X, Y, and Z, you are assured that you also have Event A. (I’m fudging the distinction between what philosophers call necessary and sufficient conditions here. I’ll try and get back to that.) If you can have conditions X, Y and Z but not have Event A, then there’s something that’s missing from your explanation. (For example, if I say “The explanation for that water boiling is that it reached 212 degrees Fahrenheit,” and then we go into high altitude and discover that 212-degree water doesn’t boil, we have to add somethign to our explanation about atmospheric pressure and sea level.) Now, maybe there’s a condition W that we hadn’t identified, and maybe there’s a pure random element such that you can’t ever give a full explanation. But in terms of defining a good explanation, it seems like this is what we’re going for.
And something that has struck me a number of times over the years is that if we think that there’s an explanation for things, then we’re essentially saying that there’s a mechanism driving events, that specific conditions dictate certain outcomes. Now, maybe we human beings won’t ever discover the explanations and the mechanisms. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. So if the world is explainable, doesn’t that suggest that the world is what is, and that it can’t be changed? That whatever efforts we might make to change or not change the world are, in fact, already part of the mechanism? (“I’m sorry my paper is late, Dr. Thomer. A pterodactyl took a wrong turn millions of years ago, so I overslept.”)
Not that a world that can’t be explained is a whole lot more reassuring. I mean, the reason we want explanations is so that we can feel like we have some control over our lives – if I do X, I will get Y. To the extent that the world is random, I can’t have any control over it.
When I think about things like this, I get the sense that I’m sticking myself into a binary, either-or box, and like a good pragmatist I should try and find the shade of gray somewhere in between. But I’ll be damned if I have a clear idea of what that shade is, sometimes.