When intelligibility collapses, explanation does not disappear. It is replaced.
The gap left by the withdrawal of explanation is not left empty for long. A range of substitute virtues rush in to occupy the space explanation once held. These surrogates do not explain phenomena, but they perform enough of the social and epistemic work of explanation to stabilise theory and silence unease.
Chief among these surrogates is unification. A theory is praised for explaining disparate phenomena by showing that they arise from a single formal structure. Yet unification, by itself, does not explain anything. It tells us that many things can be treated together, not why any of them occur. Unification is classificatory power mistaken for explanatory depth.
Closely allied to unification is mathematical elegance. Simplicity, symmetry, and aesthetic appeal are taken as indicators of explanatory success. What is elegant is assumed to be deep; what is baroque is assumed to be suspect. But elegance is not an explanatory relation — it is an aesthetic judgement. It can guide theory construction, but it cannot stand in for explanation without quietly changing what explanation means.
Another powerful surrogate is predictive success. The ability to generate accurate predictions is treated as evidence that a theory explains what it predicts. Yet prediction and explanation come apart. A system can reliably produce correct outputs while remaining explanatorily opaque. Prediction shows control over correlations; explanation shows understanding of relations.
Relatedly, computational power increasingly functions as an explanatory credential. If a model can simulate a phenomenon with high fidelity, it is treated as having explained it. But simulation reproduces behaviour; it does not account for it. The map begins to substitute for the territory.
Scale also enters as a surrogate. Explanations are valorised for operating at what is described as a “more fundamental” level. Depth is equated with smallness, abstraction, or remoteness from experience. Yet without an account of how levels relate, appeals to fundamentality explain nothing. They merely relocate the mystery.
What all these surrogates share is a crucial feature: they are theory-internal virtues. They assess how well a theory performs according to its own standards, not how well it makes sense of a phenomenon. They reward internal coherence, fertility, and reach — all genuine virtues — while quietly abandoning the explanatory task that once justified those virtues.
This substitution has a stabilising effect. By accumulating surrogate successes, a theory can appear explanatorily triumphant even as explanation itself has gone missing. Critique is deflected not by answering explanatory questions, but by overwhelming them with credentials.
The result is a peculiar inversion. Explanation no longer grounds theoretical success; theoretical success now defines what counts as explanation. Once this inversion is complete, asking whether a theory actually explains anything begins to sound naive.
In the next part, we will locate the structural absence that makes this substitution possible: the missing cut that once held theory and phenomenon in productive relation.
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