A Conversation in the Senior Common Room (Where Mr Blottisham Attempts to Finish Explanation Once and for All and Is Gently Informed That Explanation Does Not Accept Final Draft Status)
The afternoon has acquired that slightly overconfident stillness common to institutions that believe they are, in principle, comprehensible. Mr Blottisham is at the board again. He has drawn what looks like a staircase that refuses to terminate. Professor Quillibrace watches it with the expression of someone noting that a methodological habit has begun impersonating metaphysics. Miss Elowen Stray is already attending to the more delicate question of what it would even mean for “everything” to be in the room at once.
Mr Blottisham:
Right. So this is simple. Science explains things. Philosophy explains things. We keep explaining more and more. So in principle—everything can be explained. There can’t be a limit to explanation, otherwise we’d just be stopping arbitrarily.
Professor Quillibrace:
You are not extending explanation. You are inflating it until it loses contact with the conditions that make it intelligible.
Mr Blottisham:
That’s not true. We already explain almost everything! Physics, biology, psychology—
Miss Stray:
—each operating within different strata of relational organisation, with different conditions for what counts as an explanation.
You are treating them as instances of a single operation that can simply be scaled upward without transformation.
Mr Blottisham:
But explanation is explanation. If it works in one place, why not everywhere?
Professor Quillibrace:
Because “explanation” is not a uniform operation. It is a family of constrained practices embedded in specific relational systems. What you are calling “everywhere” is an abstraction that has forgotten its own construction.
Mr Blottisham:
So you’re saying there are limits?
Mr Stray:
No. That would still assume a single space with boundaries. The issue is more structural: there is no single domain called “everything” waiting to be exhaustively covered.
Mr Blottisham:
But “everything” just means all things.
Professor Quillibrace:
And there is your first distortion: you have collapsed heterogeneous relational systems into a unified object. “Everything” becomes a single thing, as if it were sitting somewhere waiting for explanation to finish walking across it.
Mr Blottisham:
So what is explanation explaining, if not everything?
Miss Stray:
Local relational configurations under constraint. Not a totality. A set of structured interactions within which explanatory practices can stabilise certain relations and not others.
Mr Blottisham:
That sounds like a retreat. From ambition.
Professor Quillibrace:
It is not a retreat. It is a correction of category. Ambition does not entitle a method to misidentify its domain.
You are taking a successful local practice and projecting it onto totality as if totality were a homogeneous object.
Mr Blottisham:
But science keeps advancing. We explain more each time.
Miss Stray:
And each advance reorganises what counts as an explanation. You are mistaking expansion of explanatory reach for convergence on a single explanatory regime.
Professor Quillibrace:
Exactly. You assume a staircase with a top step. But explanation does not terminate in a final level. It transforms across strata.
Mr Blottisham:
So there’s no final explanation?
Professor Quillibrace:
“Final explanation” is a category error. It assumes that explanation is a single process that could, in principle, be completed as a total mapping.
It cannot.
Mr Blottisham:
Why not?
Miss Stray:
Because explanation is always internal to the system that performs it. It cannot step outside itself to verify completeness against a totality it does not inhabit.
Mr Blottisham:
So we’re stuck inside partial explanations forever?
Professor Quillibrace:
“Stuck” is the wrong affective framing. There is no outside position from which partiality becomes a deficiency.
What you call “partial” is structurally appropriate to the systems in which explanation operates.
Mr Blottisham:
This is starting to feel like you’ve made explanation less useful.
Miss Stray:
On the contrary. It prevents it from being misused as a metaphysical ladder to a non-existent total viewpoint.
A pause. The staircase on the board now looks less like progress and more like a diagram of misplaced ambition.
Closing Remark (Quillibrace, with something close to sympathy):
“Can everything be explained?” appears to ask whether reality is fully intelligible in principle.
But under relational analysis, it reveals something more precise: a totalisation of explanation beyond the strata in which it is meaningful, combined with the projection of a single unbounded explanatory operation onto a heterogeneous field of relational practices.
Once these moves are undone, explanation does not fail.
It is re-situated: not as a universal procedure aimed at total coverage, but as a stratified set of practices—each locally effective, each structurally constrained, and none extending to “everything” as a single object awaiting final articulation.
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