Thursday 6 September 2018

On the demand for explanation

The humanities are in something of a bind due to the fact that its works can only exist in a narrative form.  Good luck getting a grant application approved If your project does not make for a good story, with a premise, i.e. a well defined problem (not too big but not too small; relevant but also timeless), identifiable obstacles to solving the problem (the bad guys), a tidy set of solutions to the obstacles (the good guy) and a clear indication of how the solutions will advance the field (a happy ending).  Any essay, book, or talk is bound by the same rules.   But what if the world doesn’t operate on narrative principles?  That is, what if reality follows the laws of cause, effect, matter, energy, space, and time, to whose mathematical form story arcs are invisible?  If so, why should we expect narrative structure to adequately capture reality?

Consider Kahneman and Tversky’s work on hindsight bias (“creeping determinism”) which is the tendency for us to see past events as expected, predictable, or inevitable (in hindsight) all the while happily acknowledging that the future remains unpredictable. This combination is clearly hard to make coherent but a historical narrative is precisely the act of explaining notable past events, that is to say, making them seem obvious given the proper focus on the proper underlying conditions at the time.  That is, it is the following story: given the conditions and the following historical interpretation or theory, the event was bound to occur and, using this theory, one better understand current and future events. This once again fits a classic kind if story structure.

Next consider the ancient cosmological question: why is there something at all, rather than nothing?  Recently, physicists have started turning their attention this traditional piece of philosophy, for example Lawrence Krauss’s recent book, A Universe From Nothing. It is natural for astrophysics to address this question as the attempt to explain the Big Bang, at least in some fairly direct sense, amounts to the attempt to explain why there is a universe at all.  Cosmology naturally turns toward the issue.  

But explanation is constrained by the parameters of human reasoning in ways that threaten to make the cosmological question unanswerable.  For assume physicists have identified the absolute rock bottom ontological layer.  Perhaps it is 11-dimensional strings, or a quantum vacuum, or space-time loops, or what have you.  Whatever it is, imagine it turns out to explain all other physical facts, at least when combined with initial (boundary) conditions.  Now raise the cosmological question: why is there this rather than nothing?  Well, the explanation for the existence of, say, the quantum vacuum can take one of two forms: either it is explained by the existence of something else or it is self explanatory.  In the former case, the question is just pushed back and we will need to ask why there is that further being, and so on infinitely.  In the latter case, we have a circular explanation.  Neither of these satisfies.  Each is in fact a paradigm of non-explanation.  In philosophy’s long history, two of the primary means of showing a position to be problematic is to show that it leads to an infinite regress, and so fails to explain anything (e.g McTaggart’s argument agains the reality of time) or else that an argument is circular.  Along with the charge of incoherence, these are probably the three primary stopping points in philosophical and general argumentation.  

Similar points apply to other humanities as well, of course.  A historical explanation of a phenomenon that simply points to some other phenomena in need of explanation may satisfy those for whom the other phenomenon is sufficiently acceptable as a premise, but it will hardly address the cosmological question.  Nor will an explanation that casts some event as its own explainer.  

In general, explanation proceeds by appeal to something taken as given along with some kind of organizing principle to derive a conclusion that is the item to be explained.  But this process cannot go on forever.  It must reach an end point, which is something that is an unexplained explainer or else a self-explainer that can also somehow explain everything else.  But, again, the former is simply to beg off of giving an explanation and the latter is, famously, not the kind of thing that one can expect the natural sciences to turn up, given that they are designed to investigate the empirical world in all its contingency.  As philosophers have pointed out through the ages, the posit of some kind of divine entity, a necessary being that is the ground of all being, will logically do the trick: if something is a necessary being, then it’s existence is explained by its necessity; if this being is the ground of all else, then we have explained all.  It needn’t be pointed out that the natural sciences, and naturalistically inclined philosophers, are unlikely to consider such an explanatory path to be worth pursuing.

So our quest to answer the cosmological question seems to point inevitably toward theology.  Of course, this is only apparently the case because there is an alternative: not everything can be explained.  Not because the world is some kind of mystical entity but, rather, simply because our own cognitive limitations are not up for the task of explaining all that there is.  Perhaps, in other words, it is a shortfall of our cognitive architecture that we can only understand explanations in terms of boundary conditions and applicable laws/principles.  Maybe a universe could, for example, consist of an infinite series of dependencies: matter depends on energy which depends on space-time which depends on the quantum vacuum which depends on … ad infinitum.  Such a universe would be one that would seem to us to be inexplicable.  Nevertheless, it might still be.  

The point is that whenever we seek explanation we must eventually push up against the limits of the human demand for stories of a certain kind.  Given this perennial danger, the demand that all philosophical, historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, etc. theories fit into a neat narrative structure comes to seem question-begging and needlessly limiting of the possible models of reality that we might want to consider: why prejudge the outcome at the start by turning away from an explanation that lacks the standard sorts of narrative structure?  It is hard to imagine how, say, putting a string of equations on the board followed by “therefore, reality” could possibly explain anything, but perhaps the point is that while it might not explain anything to us, it nevertheless explains everything in some sense we cannot grasp.  Or, perhaps the demand for explanation itself is the result of cognitively limited beings trying to tell a story that captures a reality that extends beyond the scope of those limits.  Perhaps the demand for explanation and understanding is misguided from the start.