Quotes About Explanation

SOCRATES: No, I am not sure of anything. I never have been. But the god explained to me why that must be so, starting with the fallibility of the human mind and the unreliability of sensory experience.

But in any case, understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind and brain, and a unique one. Many other physical systems, such as animals' brains, computers and other machines, can assimilate facts and act upon them. But at present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation – or of wanting one in the first place – other than a human mind.

Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For

Using our explanations, we 'see' right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people's behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That

Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.

inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.

There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues.

Therefore, if the ancient Greeks had known that a warm growing season occurs in Australia at the very moment when, as they believed, Demeter is at her saddest, they could have inferred that there was something wrong with their explanation of seasons.

it is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not.

What if you'd rather not know? You may not like these predictions. Your friends and colleagues may ridicule them. You may try to modify the explanation so that it will not make them, without spoiling its agreement with observations and with other ideas for which you have no good alternatives. You will fail. That is what a good explanation will do for you: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself.

Good/bad explanation An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.

They can be understood only by being explained. Fortunately, our best theories embody deep explanations as well as accurate predictions.

Scientific theories explain the objects and phenomena of our experience in terms of an underlying reality which we do not experience directly. But the ability of a theory to explain what we experience is not its most valuable attribute. Its most valuable attribute is that it explains the fabric of reality itself.

For example, you cannot predict what numbers will come up on a fair (i.e. unbiased) roulette wheel. But if you understand what it is in the wheel's design and operation that makes it fair, then you can explain why predicting the numbers is impossible.

A theory may be superseded by a new theory which explains more, and is more accurate, but is also easier to understand, in which case the old theory becomes redundant, and we gain more understanding while needing to learn less than before. That is what happened when Nicolaus Copernicus's theory of the Earth travelling round the Sun superseded the complex Ptolemaic system which had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe.

We understand the fabric of reality only by understanding theories that explain it. And since they explain more than we are immediately aware of, we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand.

This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.

Prediction – even perfect, universal prediction – is simply no substitute for explanation.

The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem.

You perceive and remember that to which you can relate. When you observe something aberrant, your tendency is to build a metaphor to explain what you didn't understand.

Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.

Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality

most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.