Introduction: The Deeper the Better?
When explanations feel unsatisfying, the usual remedy is to go deeper.
If a phenomenon is puzzling, we look for a cause beneath it. If that cause seems thin, we look for a deeper one still — further back in time, further down into mechanism, further away from the surface of experience.
This reflex is so familiar that it rarely appears as a choice. Depth is assumed to be explanatory virtue.
This post challenges that assumption.
Its central claim is simple:
Reaching further back in time or mechanism does not, by itself, produce better explanation.
Causal depth and ontological depth are not the same thing.
1. What Causal Depth Offers
Causal explanations trace sequences: this happened because that happened, which in turn was caused by something else.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Causal depth can reveal:
dependencies,
constraints,
enabling conditions,
vulnerabilities.
In many domains — engineering, epidemiology, materials science — deeper causal chains genuinely increase explanatory power.
The trouble begins when causal depth is mistaken for ontological sufficiency.
2. The Slide from Cause to Constitution
A common explanatory slide occurs here:
A phenomenon is identified.
A prior cause is located.
The cause is treated as constitutive of the phenomenon itself.
At this point, explanation changes character. What once described how something came to be possible is now taken to explain what it is.
This slide is rarely argued for. It is assumed.
But causes do not automatically constitute the things they enable. A history can condition a phenomenon without determining its present intelligibility.
3. Temporal Distance and Explanatory Authority
Explanations that reach far back in time often feel especially authoritative. Ancestry, origin, and deep history carry rhetorical weight.
The farther away the cause, the harder it becomes to contest.
Yet temporal distance does not guarantee relevance.
An account of how something emerged does not, by itself, explain how it functions now, what relations sustain it, or why it means what it does in the present.
When temporal depth substitutes for ontological analysis, explanation becomes displacement.
4. Mechanism Without Meaning
A similar issue arises with mechanistic depth. Breaking a phenomenon into smaller parts and processes can be illuminating — up to a point.
But not all phenomena are constituted by mechanisms in the same way.
Meaning-bearing phenomena, in particular, cannot be explained solely by decomposing them into sub-personal processes. No matter how detailed the mechanism, it does not tell us:
what counts as a reason,
why a norm binds,
how an action is intelligible in context.
Mechanistic depth explains how something can occur, not what it is as a phenomenon.
5. Ontological Depth as Relational Structure
Ontological depth concerns what must be in place for a phenomenon to exist as the kind of thing it is.
From a relational perspective, this means asking:
what relations constitute the phenomenon,
what distinctions it presupposes,
what alternatives it excludes.
Depth here is not a matter of going further back or further down, but of clarifying the structure of possibility within which the phenomenon is actualised.
This kind of depth keeps inquiry oriented toward the present.
Conclusion: Depth Without Displacement
The problem with many contemporary explanations is not that they go too deep, but that they go deep in the wrong direction.
By equating depth with causal distance, they trade ontological clarity for narrative authority.
A relational approach insists on a different standard:
An explanation is deep only insofar as it clarifies what makes the phenomenon what it is.
In the next post, we will examine a powerful temptation that arises once depth is misidentified: the urge to explain everything at once, and the hollowing effect of total accounts.
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