Scientific explanation is among the most powerful achievements of human thought. It stabilises patterns, constrains possibility, and renders the world tractable. Across domains, it delivers prediction, control, and coordination at scales previously unimaginable.
And yet, wherever explanation succeeds most completely, something presses back.
This post is not an argument against explanation. It is an attempt to name, carefully and without polemic, what explanation cannot contain.
Explanation as Productive Constraint
To explain is not merely to describe; it is to constrain.
Every explanation performs an act of selection:
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it fixes a unit,
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privileges a level,
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establishes variables,
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and excludes relations that cannot be stabilised within the frame.
This exclusion is not a flaw. It is what makes explanation possible. Without it, explanation dissolves into an undifferentiated field.
But exclusion has consequences.
The Remainders of Explanation
Across the sciences we have traced, certain elements return with remarkable consistency:
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Meaning, in neuroscience.
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Agency, in artificial intelligence.
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Contingency, in evolutionary biology.
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Description itself, in quantum theory.
These are not gaps waiting to be filled. They are remainders — aspects of the relational field that do not survive the cut required for explanation.
They do not disappear. They return as discomfort, debate, resistance, and intolerance.
Why These Remainders Persist
The persistence of these remainders is not due to insufficient data or immature theory.
It is structural.
To contain these fully would be to abandon explanation itself.
The Error of Closure
The most common mistake made in response to these remainders is the insistence that nothing has been excluded.
This insistence appears in many forms:
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claims that meaning is “just” neural activity,
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claims that agency is “just” optimisation,
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claims that contingency is “just” ignorance,
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claims that description mirrors reality without remainder.
These moves are not clarifications. They are acts of closure — attempts to deny the cost of the explanatory cut.
It is here that intolerance emerges most sharply.
Intolerance as Signal
Intolerance arises when explanation is asked to do what it cannot:
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to exhaust the field it cuts into,
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to absorb relational excess without remainder,
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to replace perspective with mechanism.
Resistance, anger, and conceptual revolt are not pathologies in this context. They are signals — indications that the field exceeds the form.
To read them as errors is to misread the phenomenon.
Explanation Without Sovereignty
What emerges from this series is a view of explanation that is powerful but not sovereign.
Explanation:
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works,
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constrains,
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clarifies,
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and always leaves something out.
This is not a weakness to be repaired, but a condition to be acknowledged.
Scientific understanding advances not by eliminating these remainders, but by learning to live with them — by recognising where explanation must stop without mistaking that stopping point for failure.
A Relational Orientation
Seen relationally, explanation does not reveal a world independent of perspective. It actualises intelligibility from within a field of constrained possibility.
Meaning, agency, and contingency are not external to science. They are what science must continually negotiate, suppress, and encounter again as resistance.
The task is not to resolve this tension, but to remain attentive to it.
What Remains
What explanation cannot contain is not noise or illusion. It is the relational field itself — the conditions under which explanation becomes possible, and beyond which it cannot go.
To recognise this is not to retreat from science, but to understand its power more clearly.
And the work, each time, will be to read that return with care.
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