Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 12:31:16 -0400 (EDT) To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU From: Howie Chodos <howie-AT-magi.com> Subject: Re: BHA: But can you prove it? Alan Norrie raises some important questions relating to a recurring question, how do we go about preferring one explanation (or theory) to another? He wrote: "Explanation A is better than B when it explains everything that B explains plus some significant aspect of the object under investigation which B can't." I have never been entirely satisfied with this formulation, though I'm not sure how to do better. There are two limitations to it that seem to me to be significant. In the first place, I can't help feeling that it begs a number of questions. A is better than B because it explains more than B does. But what counts as an explanation? Is there a neutral, unproblematic way to tally up which explanation explains more phenomena? Is it simply a quantitative matter? Can we explain more things and still be wrong about certain key ones? Who does the adjudicating and from what vantage point? Can it be rational to adhere to a theory which explains less? The second limitation is that explanatory power seems to me to be just one aspect that enters into the evaluative equation. The degree of explanatory power would not seem to be the exclusive determining factor, for example, in adjudicating amongst moral theories. Now if all we are concerned with is explanation, then this second limitation may not be germane. But when it comes to not unimportant matters such as how we could better organise social relations to foster human emancipation, we necessarily transcend mere explanation (eg., of the causes of human misery) and enter the realm of trying to project how new and untried ways of doing things could be better. (This point tiptoes gingerly to the edge of the whole minefield of how fact relates to value). This leads me to think that there is no way around the fact that what we judge to be better is in some sense tied to criteria that are necessarily historically and culturally circumscribed. Even Alan's formulation relativises the notion of better. Explanation A is better in relation to the explanatory power of B, not in any absolute sense. Such a notion of better is both contingent and necessary (another example, perhaps, of needing to hold onto both aspects of a duality, that Alan refers to). Its substance is contingent, while it is formally necessary to the possibility of comparing theories. I am inclined to think that this applies to judgemental rationality in general. We know that we can make rational judgements, but we cannot define in advance the content of the rationality that allows us to judge. We can compare explanations to see which one is better, but we cannot define in advance what being better means. Some notion of better is a transcendental condition for the possibility of comparing theories, but it is a formal condition. Critical realism can show us that there will always be one theory that can be preferred to another, but it does not allow us to deduce from philosphical first principles which theory that will be. I guess I'm not sure that the formulation "explanation A is better than B when it explains everything that B explains plus some significant aspect of the object under investigation which B can't" captures this. Howie Chodos --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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