Abstract
Contributing to the recent debate on whether or not explanations ought to be differentiated from arguments, this article argues that the distinction matters to science education. I articulate the distinction in terms of explanations and arguments having to meet different standards of adequacy. Standards of explanatory adequacy are important because they correspond to what counts as a good explanation in a science classroom, whereas a focus on evidence-based argumentation can obscure such standards of what makes an explanation explanatory. I provide further reasons for the relevance of not conflating explanations with arguments (and having standards of explanatory adequacy in view). First, what guides the adoption of the particular standards of explanatory adequacy that are relevant in a scientific case is the explanatory aim pursued in this context. Apart from explanatory aims being an important aspect of the nature of science, including explanatory aims in classroom instruction also promotes students seeing explanations as more than facts, and engages them in developing explanations as responses to interesting explanatory problems. Second, it is of relevance to science curricula that science aims at intervening in natural processes, not only for technological applications, but also as part of experimental discovery. Not any argument enables intervention in nature, as successful intervention specifically presupposes causal explanations. Students can fruitfully explore in the classroom how an explanatory account suggests different options for intervention.
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Notes
Inductive inference is a quite generic category (including even abductive inference), so that often different types of inductive arguments are distinguished (M. H. Salmon 2002).
Even though Osborne and Patterson’s (2011) characterization of the explanation-argument difference does not rely on the idea of causation, their discussion of the nature of explanation explicitly invokes causation: “the particular view adopted here is that the bread and butter explanations of school science are causal, for example, why do things fall, why is matter conserved, or how does photosynthesis happen … explanations consist of a subset of descriptions where new entities or properties are brought into being or invented to provide a causal account.” (pp. 628–629).
This matters also in inference to the best explanation. Given that here one wants to infer the truth of one explanatory account (e.g., that the butler committed the murder using poison), Lipton (2004) recognizes that circular reasoning would result if ‘explanation’ always meant a true account. As a result, he disambiguates by using the term ‘potential explanation’—which has all characteristics of a valid explanation except possibly for truth—and clarifies that the inference is more precisely an inference to the best potential explanation (i.e., inferring that this potential explanation is true).
In Sect. 2 I already challenged Osborne and Patterson’s (2011) characterization of the explanation-argument difference, who rely on the idea that an explanation’s explanandum is known to be true (while the explanans is tentative). Explanations of hypothetical phenomena provide an additional reason against this idea.
Osborne and Patterson (2011) mention the goal of explanation, contrasting it with the goal of argumentation, however, as we will see, what matters in my context is the aim of an individual explanation (which differs from the aim of another explanation).
Given that curricula and classroom instruction are structured along the boundaries of traditional disciplines, only little place can be given to interdisciplinarity. But there are examples from the science classroom. For instance, an explanation of the evolution of horses, e.g., the change of the leg and foot bones, involves fossil data about these skeletal features (from the discipline of paleontology), an evolutionary tree leading up to modern horses (provided by systematics), and considerations about what makes a particular leg length and foot structure adapted to a particular habitat, such as permitting faster locomotion to outrun predators upon the shift from forest to steppe (involving the fields of functional anatomy and ecology). To be sure, for the purpose of classroom instruction, what matters less than discussing whether the explanatory ingredients are from distinct disciplines is to explore how some explanations involve several ingredients. Many explanations suggested by students are not false, but incomplete, so that it is relevant to understand how the suggestions from other students add to one’s explanation, and why given the explanatory aim or question at hand, an adequate explanation combines a number of considerations.
The United States National Research Council’s (2012) K-12 science education framework portrays science in this fashion, when breaking it into eight practices (pp. 49–53). As the first practice, the framework lists that “Science begins with a question about a phenomenon … and seeks to develop theories that can provide explanatory answers to such questions” (p. 50), while practices 6 and 7 are the construction of explanations and engaging in argument from evidence so as to find the best explanation for a phenomenon.
Carrying out an ideal intervention on an individual cause A is in many practical situations not possible given that an experimental intervention often affects many features adjacent to A (e.g., in the case of brain surgery), or a cause cannot be practically influenced at all (e.g., the earth mantle convection currents that cause the movement of the continents). Yet an interventionist account is merely meant as a metaphysical account of what a cause is; and a scientific explanation that cites some such causes still reveals at least in principle possible avenues for intervention.
Even Braaten and Windschitl’s (2011) exemplary discussion of scientific explanation for the science education context fails to mention that science does and intends to intervene in nature.
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to four anonymous referees for their critical suggestions that greatly contributed to revisions of two earlier versions of the manuscript. I also thank the Fall 2014 Visiting Fellows of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh for useful suggestions on this project.
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Brigandt, I. Why the Difference Between Explanation and Argument Matters to Science Education. Sci & Educ 25, 251–275 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-016-9826-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-016-9826-6