HEMPEL'S CHARACTERIZATION OF “PRAGMATIC”

Hempel certainly acknowledges that there is a pragmatic aspect of expla­nation. He writes:

Very broadly speaking, to explain something to a person is to make it plain and intelligible to him, to make him understand it.

I am indebted to the National Science Foundation for support.

“explanation” and its cognates are pragmatic terms: their use requires ref­erence to the persons involved in the process of explaining. In a pragmatic context we might say, for example, that a given account A explains fact X to person P1. We will then have to bear in mind that the same account may well not constitute an explanation of X for another person P2, who might not even regard X as requiring an explanation, or who might find the account A unintelligible, or unilluminating, or irrelevant to what puzzles him about X.

Explanation in this pragmatic sense is thus a relative notion: something can be significantly said to constitute an explanation in this sense only for this or that individual. (1965, p. 425)

Now although Hempel recognizes a pragmatic use, or sense, or concept, of explanation, he sees his own task as one of

... constructing a nonpragmatic concept of scientific explanation—a concept which is abstracted, as it were, from the pragmatic one, and which does not re­quire relativization with respect to questioning individuals.... (1965, p. 426)

I take Hempel to be saying something like this. There are sentences, such as ones of the form

(1) Account A explains fact X to person P,

which make essential reference to some person or type of person who is explaining or being explained to. Such sentences are examples of a pragmatic use or concept of explanation. By contrast, there are other sen­tences, such as ones of the form

(2) Account A explains fact X,

which make no reference to any (type of) explainer or audience.

Let me use the term “explanation-sentence” to refer to any sentence containing the terms “explains” or “explanation.” I shall say that the terms for persons replacing S and P in sentences with forms such as the fol­lowing are terms for explainers or audiences:

S explains fact X to P

The explanation of X given by S to P is

S gave account A to P as an explanation of_______

S and P may be terms for particular explainers and audiences or for types. For example, we might have “Achinstein explained his theory to philosophers at the 1984 PSA meetings” for a particular explainer and audience, and “the contemporary physicist explains the structure of matter by invoking quarks” for a type of explainer.

Now I shall broaden what I take to be Hempel's characterization by saying that an explanation-sentence is “pragmatic” if (a) it contains terms for a (particular or type of) explainer or audience or if (b) its truth-con­ditions contain such terms or others defined using such terms. Clause (b) will take into account a view which says that although some explanation­sentences are not explicitly pragmatic they are implicitly so. For example, one might hold the view that an explanation-sentence of the form “Ac­count A explains fact X” is true iff some (type of) explainer S explains (or could explain) fact X to an audience (of type) Y by citing A. On this conception, the explanation-sentence in question would be pragmatic.

Whether this characterization of “pragmatic” captures what Hempel has in mind I will take up later. For the present, let us accept it as a suffi­cient condition.

Hempel's claim can now be put like this. Admittedly, there are prag­matic explanation-sentences, e.g., ones of the form

Account A explains fact X to person P.

Explainer S explains X to person P by giving account A.

But there are also nonpragmatic explanation-sentences. Most important for our purposes (Hempel will claim) an explanation-sentence of the fol­lowing form is nonpragmatic:

(2) Account A explains fact X.

I shall say that someone holds a pragmatic theory of explanation with respect to explanation-sentences of a given form if he maintains that expla­nation-sentences of that form are pragmatic. Someone holds a nonpragmatic theory with respect to explanation-sentences of a given form if he maintains that explanation-sentences of that form are not pragmatic. Hempel holds a pragmatic theory with respect to sentences of form (1) but not of form (2).

I want to raise some questions about nonpragmatic theories of sen­tences of form (2) and others like it. But before doing so let me turn to someone who claims to be an arch-pragmatist, namely, Bas van Fraassen.

2.