The Pragmatic Approach to Explanation Revamped and Remotivated

Abstract The aim of this article is to paint a big picture of several approaches to explanation and to motivate one of them. The approaches differ in the kind of answer they provide to the question “what is an explanation?” and, derivatively, to questions about what explanations are grounded in and how to assess explanatory quality. The syntactic approach defines explanations as arguments with a particular form. It has well-known problems, dating back to discussions of the covering law model. More recently, semantic approaches have become mainstream, primarily in a causal guise. These approaches treat explanations as defined by their content, particularly causal content. A concise statement of the semantic approach says that to explain a phenomenon is to provide a description of its causal basis. But explanations do not behave like descriptions—as seen by the importance of idealization in explanation. Moreover, recent philosophy has discussed multiple cases of non-causal explanation. Arguably, the semantic approach also provides a scant basis for assessing explanatory power. These problems motivate an alternative, pragmatic approach. I outline a version of the pragmatic approach, which grounds explanation in understanding, and note some of its precedents and inspirations, both in William Bechtel’s work and beyond. I then suggest that the pragmatic approach can readily solve the issues facing the semantic approach. I close by remarking on the considerable work that remains to be done to turn the pragmatic approach into a well-articulated account of scientific explanation.