Explanations
People differ in what they accept as constituting an “explanation.” There are people who believe that explanation consists of assigning or ascribing a label to something, and once one knows what category it’s in, one has explained it. There are other people who are far more concerned with understanding mechanism. How do things work? How do things come to be? To the first group, explanation is equivalent to ascribing a label, and once one has the label, the label has explained something. The second group vigorously disagrees. Labels are not mechanisms. These people need narratives that can deal with the emergence of the context. An explanation or a mechanism that works in a fixed world may not work in a changing world. People in the second group thus need to keep having narrative retold in current context. We believe that the ascribed label “coherent” is not enough.
