A Reason for Explanation : Explanations Provide Stable Reasons

Abstract

The general idea of the paper is to provide independent characterizations of scientific explanation and of scientific understanding and thereby to confirm or prove that the former yields the latter. After the beginnings of a deterministic theory of causation on the basis of my paper “Ordinal Conditional Functions. A Dynamic Theory of Epistemic States” (according to which causes are a particular kind of conditional reasons), taking A to (causally) explain B is explicated as believing A to be a cause of B. The paper then speculates about some principles concerning reasons and their connection to truth, the strongest of which roughly says, in accordance with Putnam's internal realism that for each true proposition there is a true ultimately stable reason. Knowing ultimately stable reasons is defended as one good way of capturing what is said about scientific understanding. So, the argument is completed by the observation that, on the basis of the given explications, having an explanation is (almost) equivalent to knowing a stable reason.