Introduction: When Explanation Wants Everything
Some explanations do not merely aim to clarify a phenomenon. They aspire to explain everything.
They promise coherence across domains, unification of disparate facts, and a single framework within which all relevant questions can be answered. Their appeal is obvious. If one account can do all the work, inquiry becomes efficient, elegant, and complete.
This post argues that such total accounts are not merely ambitious. They are explanatorily dangerous.
Theories that explain everything tend to hollow out what they explain.
1. The Appeal of Totality
Total accounts are seductive because they resolve fragmentation. They offer a single explanatory language that seems to travel effortlessly across levels, contexts, and phenomena.
Once adopted, they allow us to say:
this too is an instance of the same principle,
that apparent exception is really just another case,
nothing lies outside the scope of the theory.
This produces a powerful sense of mastery.
But mastery is not the same as understanding.
2. When Scope Replaces Precision
As explanatory scope expands, precision often contracts.
To explain everything, a theory must abstract away from the particularities that differentiate phenomena. What remains is a thin explanatory template that fits widely precisely because it says little.
The danger is subtle. The theory continues to generate correct-sounding explanations while quietly losing contact with the phenomena’s specific modes of intelligibility.
What is gained in coverage is lost in depth.
3. Phenomena Reduced to Instances
Total accounts tend to treat phenomena as interchangeable instances of a general mechanism or principle.
Once this move is made, the work of explanation shifts:
from asking what makes this phenomenon intelligible,
to showing how it fits the theory.
The phenomenon no longer resists explanation. It is absorbed.
But resistance is precisely what keeps inquiry alive.
4. The Illusion of Explanatory Completion
Because total accounts leave little unexplained, they create the impression that inquiry has reached its endpoint.
Questions that do not fit the framework are reclassified as misguided, superficial, or already answered “in principle”.
This is not explanatory success. It is explanatory foreclosure.
The theory has not explained the world; it has shrunk the space in which explanation is allowed to occur.
5. Why Meaning Suffers First
Meaning-bearing phenomena are especially vulnerable to total accounts.
Because meaning is constituted relationally and contextually, it resists uniform explanation. Total frameworks respond by flattening meaning into:
signals,
functions,
outputs,
or effects.
The appearance of explanation remains, but meaning itself thins out. What is lost is not accuracy but intelligibility.
Conclusion: The Cost of Explaining Everything
The problem with total accounts is not that they are false. It is that they succeed too well on their own terms.
By explaining everything, they leave nothing to investigate.
A relational approach insists on a different explanatory virtue:
An explanation should make room for the phenomenon to push back.
In the next post, we will examine how models and frameworks begin to answer questions on our behalf—and what is lost when inquiry is delegated in this way.
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