If explanation has become pathological, the temptation is to ask how it might be repaired. Better interpretations, clearer models, more disciplined criteria. But this temptation repeats the very mistake the series has traced. It treats explanation as a technical problem, rather than an ontological one.
The difficulty is not that contemporary theories fail to meet some external standard of explanation. It is that the conditions under which explanation could even occur have been eroded. Once the cut between theory and phenomenon is lost, no amount of refinement within theory can restore explanatory force.
Explanation is not something a theory possesses by virtue of its formal properties. It is something that happens when a theory is brought into a particular relation with phenomena — a relation that makes those phenomena intelligible within a construal of the world. This relation is ontological before it is methodological.
Seen in this light, the current explanatory impasse is not surprising. Theories that relate only to themselves can generate derivations, predictions, and simulations indefinitely. What they cannot generate is explanation, because explanation requires a standpoint from which theory and phenomenon are jointly held in view.
This is why calls for more data, greater precision, or deeper mathematics so often miss the mark. These may extend a theory’s reach, but they cannot supply what is structurally absent. Without the cut, there is nothing for explanation to bridge.
What would explanation look like after ontology? Not clearer pictures, intuitive stories, or a return to classical comfort. Nor a new methodological checklist. It would look like restraint: a refusal to treat formal success as self-justifying; a willingness to acknowledge where theory no longer answers to phenomena; and an insistence that intelligibility is not an optional virtue but the very point of explanation.
Such explanation would be perspectival rather than absolute. It would recognise that explanation is always for someone, from somewhere, within a construal that could have been otherwise. Its success would not lie in closing off questions, but in situating them.
This is not a programme, and it offers no cure. Pathological explanation cannot be fixed from within the pathological frame. It can only be recognised — and, perhaps, refused.
The task of ontology here is modest but decisive. It does not tell us which theories to accept or reject. It tells us what explanation must be, if it is to be more than a formal echo chamber.
Whether contemporary theory can meet that condition remains an open question. But without it, what we call explanation will continue to succeed brilliantly — while explaining nothing at all.
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