We tell you what explanations are and how they are classified according to different criteria. Also, how they relate to reason.
What is an explanation?
An explanation It is an exposition or statement that is made about some topic or issue, with the purpose that another person understands it. or look at it from a similar perspective. In general, every explanation has the purpose of making the matter explained more perceptible, that is, of clarifying it, providing examples, concepts, arguments and comparisons.
The word “explanation” derives from the Hispanic verb “explain,” whose origins go back to the Latin word I will explainin turn composed of the prefix ex- (“outside” or “that comes out”) and the verb I will apply (“fold”). Explaining, figuratively, is then equivalent to unfolding something, that is, to removing its folds and complexities, making it simple and evident, leaving its contents in sight. In this way, whoever explains something makes a certain content understandable.
The explanations usually They serve to connect conceptual elements, such as causes and effects, actions and motivationsand thus give meaning to the lived experience. We usually ask for explanations when there is something that we cannot decipher on our own, or that we suspect may be different from another point of view, given that we require a broader context or additional information.
Philosophy, psychology and public speaking, among other disciplines, have studied explanations to understand their mechanisms and their importance in the human learning system. Thus, it has been proposed that the ideal explanation is one that leads to objective learning, that is, to understanding a series of cause and effect relationships that allow us to predict with sufficient certainty what will happen in future similar situations.
This is the principle that governs human rationality and also the possibility of a shared language: being able to understand the experience of others and use that knowledge for our benefit.
Reason and explanation
The existence of explanations depends first of all on human reason and our species' desire to understand. In fact, The very act of understanding reality can be thought of as giving an explanation to the things that happen.whether it is a scientific, religious, fantastic or whatever type of explanation. In that act of associating a cause and an effect, human rationality is put into practice.
In fact, one of the most important motivations of human reason is inexplicable experiencesthat is, those things that cannot be explained or that challenge the logic that until then guided our understanding of the world. Since ancient times, humanity has designed methods and systems of thought to make sense of these experiences: religion and science are the best known, and each proposes its own kind of explanations.
Hence, what is understood can vary radically based on a broader context or a set of reasons not previously foreseen.
See also: Reasoning
Types of explanations
Explanations can be classified according to their nature into:
- Empirical explanations. They are those obtained through the direct analysis of the lived experience, and that are limited to what the senses allow us to perceive. For example, a person climbs a mountain and looks at the horizon around him, and upon returning he explains to his son that the Earth is flat and infinite, since he could not see the curvature of the globe anywhere.
- Scientific explanations. They are those obtained through the application of the scientific method or learned from scientific dissemination. For example, a person reads the explanation of how the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes (276-195 BC) calculated the curvature of the Earth from the shadow of an obelisk in Syene and Alexandria, and decides to replicate the experiment. Once the result is obtained, he explains to his son that the Earth is round, since he has done the mathematical calculations himself.
- religious explanations. They are those obtained through the application of a mystical or divine creed or dogma, that is, through a truth revealed by God to human beings. For example, a very religious person reads in the Bible, the sacred text of his religion, that the Earth is round but that it is only 4 thousand years old, because that is what the sacred word says.
- fantastic explanations. They are those obtained through inventiveness and creation, and that are not based on any real deductive basis. For example, a person finds himself in trouble explaining to his son why the Earth is round and decides to give him an imaginary explanation: that the shape of the planet is due to the fact that a very ancient and powerful extraterrestrial civilization decided to give it that shape and leave it in place. its place for life to flourish.
On the other hand, explanations can be classified according to the type of formal reasoning they use to reach their conclusions. Thus, then, we can distinguish between:
- Causal or deductive explanations. They are those that obtain their conclusions from a formal deduction of the premises, that is, they deduce or extract them from them. For example, a person may wonder why if all the other planets are round, the Earth might not be, and then conclude that there must be a force common to all the planets that causes the roundness.
- Probabilistic or statistical explanations. They are those that draw their conclusions by applying formal logic, but no longer from universal premises, but from probabilistic postulates, that is, percentages of possibility of things occurring or being as they are. For example, a person may study the planets visible to humanity and determine the percentage of shared roundness, concluding that it is highly unlikely that Earth is the only non-round planet in existence.
- Functional or teleological explanations. They are those that, instead of asking “why”, ask “why”, that is, they focus on the function or purpose of things (telosin Greek). In this way, a person could explain the roundness of the Earth by stating that this shape is what allows the planet to exist as it does today, with its rotational movement that produces day and night.
- Genetic or historical explanations. They are those that appeal to the origin of things to explain their way of being or their existence. For example, a person might explain the roundness of the Earth by saying that that was the shape it got when it formed from the remains of the solar system billions of years ago.
- Structural explanations. They are those that obtain their conclusions from the study of the structure of things, that is, the mechanisms that allow the production of the phenomenon studied. For example, one person explains the roundness of the Earth through the study of the density of the materials that compose it, arguing that the subsoil layers tend to cover each other in a circular manner.
Continue with: Rigority
References
- “Explanation” on Wikipedia.
- “Etymology of Explain” in the Online Spanish Etymological Dictionary.
- “Different types of explanation” by Félix Schuster in Explanation and prediction. The validity of knowledge in the social sciences (taken from the CLACSO Library).
- “Explanation” in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
