Abstract
“Explanation” refers to a wide range of activities, with a family resemblance between them. Most satisfactory explanations in a discipline for a domain fail to satisfy some general desiderata, while fulfilling others. This can happen in various ways. Why? An idealizing response would be to say that in real science explanations fall short along some dimensions, so that for any explanatory failure there is a conceivable improvement that addresses its shortcomings. The improvement may be more accurate causally or possess more unifying power, or deliver deeper understanding. We formulate a drastically less idealizing response. We argue that there are typically trade-offs in explanation, so that in strengthening one explanatory virtue one will usually weaken another. Scientific explanations, if this is correct, are constrained by such trade-offs. Particular trade-offs are appropriate for particular explanatory vehicles. There are the overarching equations of theoretical physics, which produce unification at the expense of causal detail; there are theoretical models of phenomena that occupy a middle ground between generality and the detailed workings of particular cases and get closer to explaining the workings of specific systems at the expense of unification. Sometimes experiments aim at general causal patterns at the expense of particular detail; and sometimes they are designed to give us information of particular detail at the expense of generality. There are further trade-offs associated with other vehicles of explanation. We provide examples from physics and biology.
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Notes
Note that this is an altogether different matter from the problem of unification in theoretical physics. There the problem is whether the different forms of physical interaction (“forces”), can be all given a consistent representation in terms of a single symmetry schema. So far, there is no consensus as to which symmetry schema best unifies gravitation with quantum mechanics as a (string) theory of “quantum gravity”. Our point is that, even if an empirically successful theory of quantum gravity was discovered as this special issue goes to press, that wouldn’t count in favour of unity in our explanatory practices. It would be a major achievement within theoretical physics.
In arguing for explanatory trade-offs, we take inspiration from Richard Levins’s “The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology” (Levins 1966), where he argued about trade-offs in modelling.
For a compact and insightful survey of the philosophy of explanation, see Weber et al. (2013).
De Langhe (2009) discusses explanatory virtues in a way that allows them to be traded off against one another, but is otherwise rather different from the present account.
An instance of this is Salmon’s idea of fitting phenomena in the causal structure of the world (Salmon, op. cit.).
For a recent, interesting approach to unification, and a discussion of where the problem stands, see Weber and Lefevere (2017).
Leuridan (2014) discusses virtues of unification with an emphasis that makes them subsidiary to virtues of causal power. While we are not arguing for any hierarchy or interdependence between the virtues, and indeed think that there are cases for all pairs of them where each can occur without the other, Leuridan's approach does have a general resemblance to what we say speculatively about IBE later in the paper. Morrison (2000, 2013) has explored the role of mathematical structures in cases of phenomena unification in theoretical physics and evolutionary biology. We postpone a discussion of this important topic to a sequel of the present paper.
This paper was brought to our attention by a referee and deserves more attention than we give it. The general approach of Ylikoski and Kuorikoski is similar to ours, with different emphases. They take the contrasts between different aspects of causality as central while for us they are a symptom of a wider indeterminacy. To that extent we are more sceptical about the prospects for a non-piecemeal account of explanation than they are.
In an extreme case (Lipton 2009) one can gain understanding from seeing how something could, or could have, occurred even if it did not occur for the reasons given. There is now a sizable literature on the explanation/understanding contrast, where it is linked to several different ways of making phenomena intelligible. This deserves an independent discussion. See Riggs (2003), de Regt and Parker (2014), de Regt and Diecks (2005) de Regt et al. (2009), and de Regt (2017).
The extreme opposite of this would be quantum field theory, where there is enormous explanatory power yielding very little (sense of) understanding. Understanding is limited in part because the postulated processes do not unfurl in time in a familiar way to help us separate the influences of individual causal factors. So the unification that we get makes a connection with other fairly recondite theories rather than with the intuitive causal analysis of every day cases.
For a recent, and insightful discussion of narratives in explanation, see Morgan (2017).
Just as an example! Do not take it as a report on the science. We are definitely not composing this as a theory of any autoimmune disease. But if there were really solid evidence in one case it would support the hypothesis of parallel causal detail in the other.
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We thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments.
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Rosales, A., Morton, A. Scientific Explanation and Trade-Offs Between Explanatory Virtues. Found Sci 26, 1075–1087 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09645-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09645-0