SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION IN PHILOSOPHY

 There is a scientific explanation behind everything. Finding it depends on whether you give in to the much simpler supernatural explanation
-Abhijit Naskar-

Thousands of years ago, our explanations about how the world worked were not very good. Things we couldn't understand were attributed to praise or vengeance from gods or thinking the world was random. Thanks to science, we have a much better idea about why things are the way they are. Science is the study of the natural world through observation and experiment. A scientific explanation uses observations and measurements to explain something we see in the natural world. Scientific explanations should match the evidence and be logical, or they should at least match as much of the evidence as possible.

EXAMPLES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION

We have good, scientific explanations for most of what we see in the natural world. For example, why do objects fall to the ground? Well, there is a force called gravity that attracts every object in the universe to every other object.

The scientific theory says that bigger objects produce larger forces of gravity and that the closer two objects are together the larger the force of gravity. The earth's gravity is really easy to observe because the earth is huge, and it's nearby.

Another example of a scientific explanation is the answer to the common question, 'Why is the sky blue?' It's all about light scattering. We receive white light from the sun, and that light fills the earth's atmosphere. Most of the light that passes overhead keeps going and doesn't reach our eyes at all. But some of it is scattered by the air molecules and bounces into our eyes. Blue light scatters more than any other color, so the sky appears blue to us.

Both of these are scientific explanations because they use all the observations and data we humans have collected. But, let's talk about how we evaluate scientific explanations - how we figure out whether a scientific explanation is a good one or not.

 

ARGUMENTS VS. EXPLANATIONS

Arguments and explanations share a lot of common features. In fact, it can be hard to tell the difference between them if you look just at the structure. Sometimes, the exact same structure can function as an argument or as an explanation depending on the context. At the same time, arguments are very different in terms of what they try to accomplish. Explaining and arguing are very different activities even though they use the same types of structures. In a similar vein, building something and taking it apart are two very different activities, but we typically use the same tools for both.

Arguments and explanations both have a single sentence as their primary focus. In an argument, we call that sentence the “conclusion”, it’s what’s being argued for. In an explanation, that sentence is called the “explanandum”, it’s what’s being explained. All of the other sentences in an argument or explanation are focused on the conclusion or explanandum. In an argument, these other sentences are called “premises” and they provide basic reasons for thinking that the conclusion is true. In an explanation, these other sentences are called the “explanans” and provide information about how or why the explanandum is true. So in both cases we have a bunch of sentences all focused on one single sentence. That’s why it’s easy to confuse arguments and explanations, they have a similar structure.

Many people conflate explanation and justification. An explanation is a theory about why something happened or why we should do one thing rather than another. A justification is a story about why we are right, or probably right, to adopt one theory rather than another or one proposal for action rather than another. Explanations are good; justifications are at best a waste of time.

Explanations are good because they provide a target for criticism. If I say why, I’m doing something somebody might come up with an argument against it that will change my mind. If I take an action for which I have some explanation and it all goes horribly wrong then I may be able to criticize my actions more easily if I can explain them. An explanation can also be looked upon as an encouragement to criticize an action or idea. An explicit statement of why it seems like a good idea invites people to pick apart the list of arguments I’ve given for my preference.

Justification does not encourage criticism. A justification supposedly shows that its conclusions are correct or probably correct, which means presumably that we probably shouldn’t bother criticizing them. Justification also encourages people to waste time with endless fiddly details of a particular idea or course of action when often a cold hard critical look at the theory without the details will make it seem unpromising. I will give an example. I recently witnessed a philosophy discussion in which the participants were discussing knowledge by discussing the meaning of the phrase ‘to know.’ The participants were tying themselves in knots talking about justification and so on until somebody said that maybe there was something wrong with the way people usually think about knowledge and perhaps, they should change their theories. The leader of the discussion then replied by saying, ‘Ah, but then we wouldn’t be discussing the meaning of the phrase “to know” in English.’ The discussion then waded into a mire of pointless precision and logic-chopping. The person who spoke up against this way of proceeding was right. Just discussing the meaning of ‘to know’ in English means uncritically taking on board a load of ideas many of which may be completely wrong. This is a completely wrongheaded way to do epistemology, but the people involved in trying to justify the way people use ‘to know’ were too busy looking at the fine details to see this problem. As such they spend all their time working on a problem, they could solve by spending two minutes with a dictionary instead of spending their time trying to solve interesting epistemological problems.

 

INDUCTIVE VS DEDUCTIVE REASONING

Deductive reasoning works from the more general to the more specific. Sometimes this is informally called a “top-down” approach. We might begin with thinking up a theory about our topic of interest. We then narrow that down into more specific hypotheses that we can test. We narrow down even further when we collect observations to address the hypotheses. This ultimately leads us to be able to test the hypotheses with specific data – a confirmation (or not) of our original theories.

Inductive reasoning works the other way, moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories. Informally, we sometimes call this a “bottom up” approach (please note that it’s “bottom up” and not “bottoms up” which is the kind of thing the bartender says to customers when he’s trying to close for the night!). In inductive reasoning, we begin with specific observations and measures, begin to detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative hypotheses that we can explore, and finally end up developing some general conclusions or theories.

These two methods of reasoning have a very different “feel” to them when you’re conducting research. Inductive reasoning, by its very nature, is more open-ended and exploratory, especially at the beginning. Deductive reasoning is narrower in nature and is concerned with testing or confirming hypotheses. Even though a particular study may look like it’s purely deductive (e.g., an experiment designed to test the hypothesized effects of some treatment on some outcome), most social research involves both inductive and deductive reasoning processes at some time in the project. In fact, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we could assemble the two graphs above into a single circular one that continually cycles from theories down to observations and back up again to theories. Even in the most constrained experiment, the researchers may observe patterns in the data that lead them to develop new theories.

 

SUMMARY

A scientific explanation uses observations and measurements to explain something we see in the natural world. Scientific explanations should match the evidence and be logical, or they should at least match as much of the evidence as possible. The argument slightly differs from the explanation. While arguments attempt to show that something is, will be, or should be the case, explanations try to show why or how something is or will be. The difference between explanation and justification is, the explanation as to why a belief is true. Justification may be understood as the explanation as to why a belief is a true one or an account of how one knows what one knows.