In the wake of totality, explanation requires a radical reconception. Too often, we assume that to explain is to inventory, to represent, or to predict — that an explanation’s value lies in its completeness. Post-totality ontology reveals that these assumptions are category mistakes. Explanation is not completion, and understanding is not the accumulation of total facts.
1. Explanation Is Not Inventory
A common intuition holds that explaining something involves listing all its parts, interactions, or causes. We might imagine a “final explanation” as a complete map: all variables, all dependencies, all outcomes. Post-totality thinking dissolves this.
Key insight: An explanation works only relative to constraints and perspective. It isolates relevant distinctions, articulates relationships, and enables navigation within a space of possibilities. Completeness is neither achievable nor necessary. Indeed, demanding it conflates explanation with inventory — a formal structure masquerading as epistemic achievement.
2. Explanation Is Not Representation
Representation suggests a mirror: an explanation corresponds perfectly to reality. But phenomena are construed under cuts; reality is never fully present to any observer, model, or symbolic system.
Explanations do not present “the world itself.” They articulate relations among phenomena and organise what is intelligible. To confuse explanation with representation is to ignore the perspectival, relational nature of understanding.
3. Explanation Is Not Prediction
Prediction can succeed without deep understanding, and understanding can exist without predictive power. Explanation orients, rather than guarantees outcomes. A well-crafted explanation tells us how to navigate a system of distinctions, not how to exhaustively foresee every instantiation.
This is why even incomplete, non-deterministic, or probabilistic explanations can be profoundly informative. They constrain possibility, reveal structure, and stabilise meaning — without claiming total knowledge.
4. Understanding as Orientation
At the heart of post-totality explanation is orientation within a space of possibilities. To understand is to know:
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which distinctions matter,
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which phenomena are salient under the cut,
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how systems constrain instantiation,
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and how symbolic structures can stabilise and extend meaning.
Understanding is active. It is relational, perspectival, and operational, rather than representational or final.
5. Implications for Meaning
Explanation is intimately tied to meaning. But it is crucial to avoid the trap of collapsing into psychology or epistemology. Explanation:
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presupposes phenomena already articulated,
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uses symbolic systems to make distinctions transportable,
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and generates second-order structure over first-order meaning.
It is this disciplined orientation — not totality or exhaustive representation — that allows understanding to emerge.
Conclusion:
In a world without totality, explanation is not a final verdict but a disciplined orientation. It guides, constrains, and organises, but it does not close the space of possibilities. Understanding, therefore, is dynamic, relational, and perspectival.
This post sets the stage for the series: we will now explore how explanations function as constraint-sensitive navigational tools, how understanding moves within possibility, and how symbolic systems stabilise orientation without claiming omniscience.
Next, we will turn to Post 2 — Orientation Within Possibility, where explanation’s dynamic, perspectival nature is brought into focus.
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