“The Pragmatic Character of Explanation” is reprintedby permission from Philosophy of Science Association Symposium Proceedings 1984 (1985), 275-292.
I distinguish a strong and a weak sense in which the concept of an explanation might be considered pragmatic. I provide a definition of “an explanation”—that is, the product of a potential act of explaining.
And I argue that such a product is pragmatic only in a weak sense—one that does not vary from one explainer or audience to another. I also distinguish the concept of a “good explanation,” which is strongly pragmatic, from that of a “correct explanation, ” which is only weakly pragmatic. There is a brief addendum on “correct explanations.”Some of those, including the present writer, who criticize standard models of explanation, such as Hempel's D-N (deductive-nomological) model or Salmon's S-R (statistical-relevance) model, do so on the grounds that explanation is a “pragmatic” or “contextual” concept—an idea which the standard models seem to reject. Yet the sense in which explanation is, or is not, pragmatic is not always made clear by the critics or champions of the models. Indeed, some critics and some champions may even mean different things by “pragmatic” or “contextual.” In this chapter, I want to try to clarify a sense in which explanations might reasonably be considered pragmatic, discuss a couple of theories that are or are not pragmatic in this sense, argue the advantages of a pragmatic account, and briefly note some consequences of this for those seeking models of explanation.
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