Intelligibility and the CAPE: Combatting Anti-psychologism about Explanation

Abstract

Much of the philosophical discussion of explanations has centered around two broad conceptions of what sorts of ‘things’ explanations are – namely, the descriptive and ontic conceptions. Defenders of each argue that scientific psychology has at best little to contribute to the study of explanations. These anti-psychologistic arguments come in two main varieties, the metaphysical and the epistemic. Both varieties trace back to Hempel and recur in the more recent writings of prominent mechanists. The metaphysical arguments attempt to combat psychologism about explanation by doubly dissociating explanations themselves from the commonly associated phenomenology of explanation. The epistemic arguments attempt to combat psychologism by doubly dissociating the good-making features of explanations from the CAPE. I focus on the metaphysical arguments here, for only they directly concern the nature of, as opposed to the evaluation conditions for, explanations. The metaphysical arguments are all shown to equivocate over ‘explanation’, and thus they are no threat to the proposal that sometimes explanations just are psychological events. Such arguments do, nonetheless, gesture towards something important – namely, that the CAPE is neither necessary nor sufficient for explanation in any sense. Similar considerations lead another latter-day mechanist to conclude that no phenomenology of any sort is essential for explanation. What all of these thinkers overlook, however, is that there is another important phenomenological correlate of explanation – namely, finding a happening intelligible or understanding how or why-possibly – and it may well be of the very essence of explanation, at least in the psychological sense. I propose a psychomechanistic theory of intelligibility that accounts for how we can, through finite means, make boundless, endlessly qualified inferences about the implications of our explanations. In closing I note that, although finding a happening intelligible does sometimes engender an unjustified confidence in correctness, we should not overlook how attaining this state does at least put us in a kind of epistemic base camp. I also hint at how intelligibility could turn out to be the ultimate source of the descriptive and ontic conceptions of explanation.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

Beyond Psychologism and Anti-Psychologism.Lilian O’Brien - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2):281-295.
Causal patterns and adequate explanations.Angela Potochnik - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (5):1163-1182.
Is folk psychology different?Jonathan Knowles - 2002 - Erkenntnis 57 (2):199-230.
What Good Is an Explanation?Peter Lipton - 2001 - In G. Hon & S. Rakover (eds.), Explanation. Springer Verlag. pp. 43-59.
Explanation in Metaphysics?Johannes Persson - 2011 - Metaphysica 12 (2):165-181.
Explaining Reference: A Plea for Semantic Psychologism.Santiago Echeverri - 2014 - In Julien Dutant, Davide Fassio & Anne Meylan (eds.), Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel. University of Geneva. pp. 550-580.
A Unificationist Vindication of Moral Explanation.Lei Zhong - 2011 - Philosophical Forum 42 (2):131-146.
Viability explanation.Arno Wouters - 1995 - Biology and Philosophy 10 (4):435-457.

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-09-07

Downloads
58 (#248,081)

6 months
4 (#319,344)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?