The Ontology Of Explanation: 1 What We Think an Explanation Is

There is a quiet confidence with which we use the word explanation. To explain something is, intuitively, to make it intelligible: to render a phenomenon graspable, situatable, and no longer puzzling. An explanation does not merely state that something happens; it lets us see why it happens.

This intuitive sense of explanation is not technical. It is older than science, older than philosophy, and deeply embedded in everyday social life. When an explanation succeeds, it produces a distinctive phenomenological shift: confusion gives way to orientation; surprise gives way to recognition. We feel that something has been made sense of.

This feeling is not incidental. It is the functional core of explanation.

An explanation, in this everyday sense, does not float freely. It is always tethered to something experienced or at least experienceable. We explain why the kettle boiled, why the bridge collapsed, why the sky darkens before a storm. Even when explanation invokes abstract entities or mechanisms, it does so in service of re‑anchoring our understanding of a phenomenon.

Historically, scientific explanation inherited this role. Theories were explanatory insofar as they reorganised experience: by revealing hidden regularities, by subsuming disparate phenomena under shared principles, or by identifying mechanisms that could plausibly be taken as operative in the world. Mathematical formalism functioned as a means, not an endpoint. It disciplined explanation; it did not replace it.

Crucially, explanation was not merely about derivability. Showing that a result followed from a set of principles was not sufficient on its own. What mattered was whether those principles themselves had been made intelligible, and whether the derivation illuminated rather than obscured the phenomenon in question.

This is why explanation has always had a normative dimension. Some explanations are better than others, not because they are more formally elaborate, but because they do more explanatory work. They leave less arbitrary residue. They reduce surprise without demanding surrender.

Yet this intuitive understanding now sits uneasily alongside contemporary scientific practice — especially in fundamental physics. We are repeatedly told that theories can be explanatory even when they resist interpretation, defy intuition, or actively undermine intelligibility. We are assured that explanation has occurred once a phenomenon has been mathematically derived, even if no further sense can be made of the derivation itself.

The result is a growing dissonance. On the one hand, explanation is still rhetorically invoked as a central scientific virtue. On the other hand, the conditions under which something counts as an explanation have quietly shifted.

This series begins from a simple observation: we have not merely lost explanation in some domains — we have redefined it. And that redefinition was not forced by nature, but by theoretical choices that have consequences we have not yet fully faced.

Before we can examine those consequences, we must first be clear about what explanation was taken to be, before it began to change.