Scientific explanations are a huge topic in the philosophy of science. The basic question, as I understand it, is what it is for a scientist to give an explanation for some phenomena. In one influential tradition, tracing back to Carl Hempel, explanations are taken to be a arguments that have to fulfill certain conditions. The most important one – for my question - is that the premises must, at least, contain one formulation of a natural law. This idea has been extensively discussed and criticized. Nonetheless, the basic idea is still rather prevalent among philosophers.
There is another approach to what it is for scientist to explain something. The Nobel Laureate Jean Baptiste Perrin has expressed the basic idea in the following way: “[To establish the] existence and [to find] the properties of objects that still lie outside our ken, [is] to explain the complications of the visible in terms of invisible simplicity.“.
Noam Chomsky argues that for a scientist to give an explanation is to reduce the complex visibles to the simple invisibles, i. e. to give an explanation by reduction. The basic idea, as I understand it, is this: Scientist work at the border of current understanding. Things that are understood are uninteresting as well a things that lie too far outside of our current understanding. The task of the scientist is then to expand understanding by describing some observable phenomena and to reduce them to whatever (hopefully simple) underlying mechanism that explains these phenomena.
The thesis is then this: to give explanations by reduction is to find the simple invisibles and to give formulations that capture them. For simplicity, one may regard these formulations as formulations of natural law. It would then be the case that scientific explanations, as characterized in the Hempel tradition, are secondary to scientific explanations understood as explanations by reduction. It is certainly necessary to show that one can deduce some phenomena form a natural law (and further premises), but one may hope that there are systematic ways to find these laws in the first place.
My questions are these: Are there systematic ways to find the laws of nature and if so, how would you characterize these ways in terms of scientific explanations, or do you think the ideas laid out above are way of?
Sven Beecken
In my humble opinion, the demand for explanation is excessive. If something exists, first we need to make sure it exists. And the explanation is for theorists. Explanations may vary, improve, etc. but the phenomenon itself is primary. Secondly, the explanation is not valuable itself, but should have at least minimal predictive potential. At a minimum, similar phenomena should have explanations in same frameworks, or explanation why this similarity is imaginary. In reality, the “everything-in-the-world-theory" mostly works for a very specific phenomenon only.
In my humble opinion, the demand for explanation is excessive. If something exists, first we need to make sure it exists. And the explanation is for theorists. Explanations may vary, improve, etc. but the phenomenon itself is primary. Secondly, the explanation is not valuable itself, but should have at least minimal predictive potential. At a minimum, similar phenomena should have explanations in same frameworks, or explanation why this similarity is imaginary. In reality, the “everything-in-the-world-theory" mostly works for a very specific phenomenon only.
It turned out that scientist do not necessarily answer the question "What's going on?" - and still obtain most relevant results. In the realm of quantum mechanics the scientific theory shrinks, to my understanding, to a description rather than being an explanation. After all, science advances towards an accurate picture of possible measurements. It's not even clear in what sense the underlying mathematical concepts can be considered real.
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