Abstract:

Drawing on themes from Wondrous Truths – from epistemic contingency in the history of science and the drab status of IBE as mere induction, to the sense of understanding and an ontic account of explanation – I argue that these provide unanticipated support for a realist interpretation of the rise of modern science. People are full of explanations for all kinds of events – autism, getting colds, career achievement, ulcers, drug addiction, murder rates, and so on. How do you sift the good explanations from the bad? Philosophers of science have done so by proposing formal models that specified conditions for good explanation. But it turns out one model doesn’t fit all explanations. In addition, philosophers have by and large neglected the psychology of explanation. That area of research attempts to document why people accept the explanations that they do. The psychology of explanation has identified many pitfalls: There are illusions of explanatory depth, overconfidence, familiarity, and other effects that account for why people accept the explanations they do. I will argue that we are prone to accepting explanations that are fluent, that fit certain prototypical explanatory patterns in our entrenched theories. This fluency supplies a sense of understanding, whether or not the theory is accurate. What happens when the background theory is inaccurate? Scientists and other explainers experience a “false climb”, a reference to a well-known aviation illusion that creates the feeling that you are ascending while you are plunging to your demise. Once we locate the reason for explanatory acceptance in features of fluency, we can offer explanations for the successes and failures of modern, typically Western, science that are both important and surprising.