Scene: The faculty room, late afternoon. Light slants through tall windows. Chalk dust hangs in the air like an unresolved question. Professor Quillibrace sits at the long table, calmly annotating a page that already looks complete. Miss Elowen Stray is perched on the window ledge, reading. Mr Blottisham enters briskly, visibly agitated, clutching a sheaf of papers.
Blottisham:
Professor, I’ve read the series. All of it. And I must protest.
Quillibrace:
Naturally.
Blottisham:
You dismantle explanation itself! You remove its endpoint, its payoff, its satisfaction. An explanation that doesn’t finish is no explanation at all.
Quillibrace:
That depends, Mr Blottisham, on what you think explanation is for.
Blottisham:
To tell us how things really are!
Elowen Stray: (without looking up)
That sounds less like explanation and more like ownership.
Blottisham:
Oh come now. When I explain something, I want to eliminate uncertainty. Close the question. Reduce the alternatives.
Quillibrace:
Yes. That is precisely the mistake.
Blottisham:
Mistake? Surely explanation ends inquiry.
Quillibrace:
Only if one mistakes explanation for termination rather than orientation.
(Blottisham frowns.)
Blottisham:
Orientation toward what?
Quillibrace:
Toward a space of constrained possibilities. Explanation does not exhaust; it shapes. It does not conclude; it enables movement.
Blottisham:
That sounds like evasion.
Elowen Stray:
It sounds like navigation. You don’t complain that a map fails because it doesn’t contain the landscape.
Blottisham:
But if an explanation leaves alternatives open, how can it be said to explain anything?
Quillibrace:
Because it tells you which alternatives matter, which distinctions hold, and which moves remain intelligible. That is not weakness — it is the entire point.
Blottisham:
Then explanation is… incomplete by design?
Quillibrace:
Exactly. Explanation that aimed at completion would destroy what it sought to clarify. The phenomenon would vanish under the demand for closure.
Elowen Stray:
When explanation closes completely, nothing more can appear. Understanding dies of success.
Blottisham:
But science progresses by deeper explanations! More fundamental ones!
Quillibrace:
Deeper, yes. Final, no. Each explanation reorganises the field of relevance. None claims to finish it.
Blottisham:
Then when do we stop?
Quillibrace:
When the explanation does the work required of it.
Blottisham:
And who decides that?
Elowen Stray:
The phenomenon. Always the phenomenon.
(Blottisham paces.)
Blottisham:
So explanation isn’t about mirroring reality?
Quillibrace:
No. It is about constructing symbolic orientations that allow coordinated understanding without totality.
Blottisham:
Nor about prediction alone?
Quillibrace:
Prediction is a by-product, not the essence.
Blottisham:
Nor reduction?
Quillibrace:
Reduction is one technique among others — useful, dangerous, never sovereign.
Elowen Stray:
Explanation is a way of making phenomena shareable without pretending they are finished.
Blottisham: (slowing)
Then what have I been demanding all this time?
Quillibrace:
Closure disguised as understanding.
Blottisham:
And what have you been offering instead?
Quillibrace:
A discipline of intelligibility that refuses to end the conversation it makes possible.
(A pause.)
Blottisham:
So explanation does not give me the world…
Elowen Stray:
…but it gives you a way to move within it — carefully, relationally, and together.
Quillibrace: (standing)
Explanation is not the last word. It is the condition under which words continue to matter.
(Blottisham looks down at his papers. For once, he does not try to organise them.)
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