A Toolbox for Describing and Evaluating Explanatory Practices
In this chapter we develop a toolbox for analysing explanatory practices. An analysis of an explanatory practice can be either a description or a description plus an evaluation (one cannot evaluate without knowing what is going on, so evaluation without d
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A Toolbox for Describing and Evaluating Explanatory Practices
3.1 Introduction In this chapter we develop a toolbox for analysing explanatory practices. An analysis of an explanatory practice can be either a description or a description plus an evaluation (one cannot evaluate without knowing what is going on, so evaluation without description is impossible). Because explanations consist of an explanans and an explanandum, we need tools for analysing both parts. In Sect. 3.2 we introduce a set of important types of why-questions, ordered in four main categories. This section offers tools for describing the explananda that scientists are dealing with. In Sects. 3.3–3.6 we present possible formats for answers to explanationseeking questions (each section is about one of the main categories distinguished in Sect. 3.2). That completes the toolbox we need for describing explanatory practices. Section 3.7 adds a normative component: tools for the evaluation of explanatory practices. These tools take the form of clusters of evaluative questions (we will present five such clusters). Before we start with this, let us clarify how this chapter fits into the pragmatic approach we are advocating. Instead of general descriptive claims about all scientists, we propose to make descriptive claims about the explanatory practice of individual scientists or groups of scientists. Sections 3.2 till 3.6 contain the tools to do this. Section 3.7 contains the tools for making normative claims about the explanatory practices of scientists. In general, normative claims can have two forms: evaluative (“This act is good/bad”) or prescriptive (“Do this!” Or “Don’t do this!”). We offer a toolbox for making evaluative claims (“This explanatory practice is good/bad”) but these can be translated into prescriptions (“Keep on doing this!” Or “Change your practice in this and this way!”). The scope of the claims we propose to make with the toolbox is restricted: they are about specific scientists in a specific context.
E. Weber et al., Scientific Explanation, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6446-0_3, © The Author(s) 2013
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3 A Toolbox for Describing and Evaluating Explanatory Practices
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3.2 Types of Explanation-Seeking Questions 3.2.1 Explanations of Particular Facts Versus Explanations of Regularities Let us repeat a part of a quote from Salmon we already used in Chap. 2: Scientific explanations can be given for such occurrences as the appearance of Halley’s comet in 1759 or the crash of a DC-10 jet airliner in Chicago in 1979, as well such general features of the world as the nearly elliptical orbits of planets or the electrical conductivity of copper. (1984, p. 3)
The distinction between questions about particular facts and questions about regularities is made by all philosophers of explanation, starting with Hempel. After giving some examples in which the DN-model is applied to particular facts, he writes: So far we considered only the explanation of particular events occurring at a certain time and place. But t
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