What Counts as an Explanation?: 3 Orientation Over Closure

Introduction: The Danger of Ending Inquiry

Explanation carries a seductive promise: the possibility of closure. Once we feel we understand something, there is relief, satisfaction, and the comforting sense that the problem is solved.

Yet this very comfort can be the enemy of insight. Closure often comes too early, silencing questions before the phenomenon has had its say. In this post, we examine orientation over closure — a principle that keeps explanations open, responsive, and alive.

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1. Orientation vs Completion

Orientation is about position, perspective, and responsiveness. An explanatory account that orients:

• highlights the relevant relations,

• clarifies what matters and what could vary,

• leaves space for the phenomenon to resist or push back.

Closure, by contrast, treats explanation as final. It asserts that enough has been said and inquiry can end. The world appears settled, but understanding has been preempted.

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2. Signs of Premature Closure

Explanations tend to close inquiry when they:

• substitute a story for relational clarity,

• reduce the phenomenon to an antecedent, measure, or model output,

• claim universality without attending to context,

• feel authoritative or inevitable.

The common thread is that the explanation stops listening. It imposes understanding rather than facilitating it.

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3. How Orientation Preserves Openness

Orientation preserves the potential for re-entry. A well-oriented explanation:

• exposes assumptions without disguising them,

• clarifies relations rather than fixating on objects,

• acknowledges what remains uncertain or contingent,

• allows further investigation to refine understanding.

The aim is not a final answer but a living understanding.

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4. Orientation in Practice

In practice, orientation often feels incomplete, even unsatisfying. It does not give the relief of closure. But it ensures that:

• explanations remain answerable to phenomena,

• complexity is acknowledged rather than flattened,

• subsequent inquiry can build on, rather than overturn, prior insight.

Orientation is thus a disciplined attention, a commitment to responsiveness rather than completion.

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5. Preparing for Hidden Criteria

Understanding orientation over closure prepares us to examine the hidden criteria we habitually use to judge explanations. These implicit standards shape what we accept as good explanation, often without conscious awareness.

In the next post, we will make these criteria explicit, showing how authority, familiarity, and perceived simplicity quietly guide our judgments — and how they can mislead.