The Ontology Of Explanation: 3 The Collapse of Intelligibility

Once explanation has been reduced to derivation, intelligibility becomes surplus to requirements.

This shift does not announce itself openly. No one declares that understanding no longer matters. Instead, intelligibility is quietly reframed — no longer as a criterion of explanatory success, but as a contingent psychological state of the audience. Whether a theory is understood comes to be treated as separate from whether it explains.

The rhetoric that accompanies this move is by now familiar. When a theory resists interpretation, this is presented not as a defect but as a mark of profundity. Appeals to intuition are dismissed as parochial, anthropocentric, or nostalgically classical. The failure to understand is redescribed as a failure of imagination rather than a failure of explanation.

In this way, intelligibility is not merely deprioritised; it is actively discredited. To ask for understanding becomes suspect. It signals an attachment to outdated modes of thinking, or an inability to keep pace with the formalism. What was once a legitimate explanatory demand is recast as an emotional need.

This rhetorical reversal has a powerful stabilising effect. By treating intelligibility as optional, theories are insulated from a whole class of critique. If understanding is not required, then opacity cannot count against explanatory success. The more resistant a theory is to interpretation, the easier it becomes to defend.

At this point, explanation undergoes a further transformation. Rather than producing orientation, it demands submission. The appropriate response to theory is no longer insight, but acceptance. One is invited to trust the mathematics where understanding fails.

This trust is not misplaced in itself. Mathematics is an indispensable constraint on theory. But when trust replaces intelligibility entirely, explanation ceases to function as explanation. It becomes a credential: evidence that the theory is powerful, not that it makes sense of anything.

The collapse of intelligibility therefore marks a deeper shift than mere pedagogical difficulty. It signals a change in what explanation is taken to be for. Explanation no longer serves to connect theory to phenomena in a way that renders the world more graspable. It serves instead to certify theoretical authority.

This is why the appeal to future understanding plays such a central role. We are told that intelligibility may come later — with better tools, deeper mathematics, or a more advanced cognitive framework. For now, derivation must suffice. The explanation is deferred.

But a deferred explanation is not an explanation at all. It is a promissory note.

What matters here is not whether understanding will someday arrive, but what is being accepted in its absence. When intelligibility is treated as expendable, explanation becomes indistinguishable from formal success. The gap between theory and phenomenon is no longer something to be bridged, but something to be ignored.

In the next part, we will examine what rushes in to fill this gap — the surrogates that come to stand in for explanation once intelligibility has been allowed to collapse.